Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tatar is spoken by about 5 million people. Most speakers live in Russia, with significant communities also found in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Finland, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States, among other countries.
The official script for Tatar in the Republic of Tatarstan is Cyrillic, mandated by a Russian federal law passed in 2002. Unofficially, Latin and Arabic scripts are also used. Kryashens, the Christian Tatars, continue to use a Cyrillic alphabet devised by Nikolay Ilminsky in the 19th century.
Tatar, Crimean Tatar, and Siberian Tatar are all part of the broader Kipchak branch of Turkic languages, but they are distinct. Crimean Tatar belongs to a different Kipchak subgroup and is heavily influenced by Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Many linguists consider the Siberian Tatar varieties to be independent of Volga-Ural Tatar rather than true dialects of the same language.
Tatar has two main dialects: the Central or Middle dialect, spoken in Kazan and most of Tatarstan, which forms the basis of the standard literary language; and the Western or Mishar dialect, which lacks the uvular consonants q and ğ found in Central Tatar. Some linguists also treat the Siberian Tatar varieties as a third dialect group, though others classify them as separate languages.
As of 2001, Tatar was classified as a potentially endangered language. The Siberian Tatar varieties received the more severe designations of "endangered" and "seriously endangered" at the same time. Since 2017, Tatar language classes are no longer mandatory in Tatarstan's schools, a change critics argue will further endanger the language.
Tatar was written with a Latin alphabet called Jaꞑalif from 1928 until 1939, when the Soviet government imposed Cyrillic. After the Soviet period, Tatarstan passed a law in 1999, effective in 2001, establishing a new official Latin alphabet. A Russian federal law overrode it in 2002, and the Tatar Supreme Court formally annulled the Tatarstani law on the 28th of December 2004. A new Latin alphabet with limited official use was adopted by the Tatarstan government in 2012.