Short answers, pulled from the story.
About 5.3 million people speak Tatar in Russia, and more than 7 million speakers exist globally. Communities of speakers live in Azerbaijan, China, Finland, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States, and Uzbekistan.
Two main dialect groups define modern usage: Central or Middle (Urta / Qazan) and Western (Könbatış / Mişär). The Central dialect serves as the basis for standard literary Tatar and covers Kazan and most of Tatarstan while the Western dialect lacks the uvular q and g sounds found in the Central group.
In 1939, all parts of the Soviet Union switched to Cyrillic script which remains standard today. A Republic law passed in 1999 established an official Latin alphabet effective from 2001 but Russian federal legislation overrode this decision in 2002 making Cyrillic the sole official script again.
The Golden Horde period between 1242 and 1502 saw extensive use of Persian alongside Turkic tongues. Religious and legal matters utilized Arabic during that era and many Persian and Arabic works remain part of contemporary Tatar literature today.
Nouns inflect for cases and numbers using suffixes that change based on the final consonant of the root word. Verbs conjugate through tense markers attached directly to stems with present tense uses a or ıy depending on whether the stem ends in a consonant or vowel.