Turkic people
The Turkic people (Turkic: Türk, pl. Türkler) are an ethnic group, in the sense of sharing a common Turkic culture, descent, and speaking the languages of the Turkic linguistic family as a mother tongue. Within suzerain Turkic states, Turkic people are defined by citizenship (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, etc), distinguished from people of Turkic ancestry. Within non-Turkic states, Turkic people are defined by their ethnicity, and may constitute a recognized organized political body (China, Russia, etc). Historically, the Turkic people tended to stay together, reassembling and recombining as a community after every cataclysm in their history, and be open to other ethnicities, easyly absorbing and incorporating people of other ethnicities.
The terms Türk and Türkic arose and gained wide circulation in the 6th c. AD, with an ascend and political expansion of the First Turkic Kaganate, but even then most of the Turkic people did not adopt these super-ethnic terms, and some remained anaware of their Turkic affiliation until the 18th and 19th centuries, when the modern nationalism made them cognizant of their distinct ethnicity. Historicaly, any Turkic community was poly-ethnic, and people were differentiated by the name of their tribe, clan, tribal union, or geographical location. One of the general terms, used before the term Türk, was the term "Hun". "Significantly, in the written sources all or nearly all ancient Türkic tribes (Türks, Kirkuns, Agach-eri, On-ok, Tabgach, Comans, Yomuts, Tuhses, Kuyan, Sybuk, Lan, Kut, Goklan, Orpan, Ushin and others) carried the name "Huns". In other words, the term "Hun" in each separate case was equivalent to the self-name of a tribe, but at the same time it was a wider concept, reflecting a certain commonality of the ethnic origin". In ancient Turkic languages, the term "hun" meant "kin", and designated kindered people. The second general term was "Tele", in Chinese pinyin transcription spelled Tiele, which covered a large number of Turkic Siberian tribes, and survived to the present as a root of the ethnic terms like Teleut and Telengit, and in the placenames (lake Tele). A third general term was "Tatar", it was a common ethnonym for a large Central Asian tribal confederation, and in the Middle Age for a time it became a common exoethnonym for many European Turkic peoples.
It is generally believed that the first Turkic people were native to a region extending from Central Asia to Siberia. Some scholars and multiple records of Chinese annals state that the Huns were one of the earlier Turkic tribes, while other scholars support either a Mongolic or Finno-Ugric or Enisean or Iranian origin for the Huns. Otto Maenchen-Helfen's linguistic studies also support a Turkic origin for the Huns. Chinese annals ascribe the dynastic clan of the Huns to a royal Xia exile from China tribal period dated 1764 BC. However, archeological and cultural evidence suggest that Huns reached China in much later period, after the 12th c. BC.
