Kumyks (, ) are a Turkic people, living in Dagestan, Chechnya and North Ossetia. They are the largest Turkic people in the North Caucasus.
They traditionally populate the Kumyk plateau (northern Dagestan and north-eastern Chechnya), lands bordering the Caspian Sea, areas in North Ossetia, Chechnya and along the banks of the Terek river. They speak the Kumyk language, which until the 1930s had been the lingua-franca of the Northern Caucasus.
Territories where Kumyks have traditionally lived, and where their historical state entities used to exist, are called Kumykia (). All of the lands populated by Kumyks were once part of the independent Tarki Shamkhalate.
Population and present settlement area
Kumyks comprise 14% of the population of the Republic of Dagestan, the third-largest population of Chechnya, and the fifth-largest population of North Ossetia, all of which are parts of the Russian Federation.
Kumyks are the second largest Turkic-speaking ethnic group after Azerbaijanis in the Causasus, the largest Turkic people of the North Caucasus and the third largest ethnic group of Dagestan.
According to the Russian national census of 2010 there were more than 500,000 Kumyks in Russia.
Russian Federation
In terms of administrative division in their native lands, Kumyks today are mostly divided between a few administrative regions of Russia, such as Republic of Dagestan, Republic of North-Ossetia, Chechen Republic.
Turkey and the Middle East
In the 19th century, during and following the Caucasian War, numbers of Kumyks were subject to or willingly resettled (made hijra) to the Ottoman Empire as a result of Russian deportation campaigns in the region.
In the 1910s-1920s, during the Bolshevik Revolution, another emigration wave to Turkey took place. Among the muhajirs (migrants) of that period were many prominent Kumyk nobility.
Kumyks also used to move to Syria and Jordan, where a few Kumyk families still live. The Syrian village of Dar-Ful was established in 1878-1880 by Kumyk emigrants.
There is no official state census of ethnic minorities in Turkey (ethnic or racial censuses are outlawed), but according to the studies of 1994–1996, there were more than 20 settlements with Kumyk population.
Ethnonym
The majority of researchers (Bakikhanov, S.A. Tokarev, A.I. Tamay, S. Sh. Gadzhieva) derive the name "Kumyk" from a Turkic ethnonym Kimak, or from another name for Kipchaks — Cuman.
According to P. Uslar, in the 19th century the names "Kumyk" and "Kumuk" pertained to the Turkic speaking population of the Northern Caucasian lowlands. In Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia, the name Kumyk, or originally Kumuk pertained to the Kumyks only. Y. Fyodorov wrote, based on sources from the 8–19 cc., that "Gumik — Kumyk — Kumuk" is originally a Dagestani toponym from the Middle Ages.
In various Russian, European, Ottoman and Persian sources Kumyks were also called Dagestan Tatars (or Dagestan Turks), Circassian and Caucasus Tatars.
Origin
There is no universal opinion regarding the origin of the Kumyks. Some scholars propose that the population of the Kumyk plains of the 8th-10th centuries were directly ancestral to modern Kumyks. A view close to that is that the Kumyks appeared in Dagestan along with the Khazars in the 8th century and stayed afterwards. Whereas others believe that the Kumyks appeared in Dagestan in the 12th-13th centuries along with Kipchaks.
Kumyk verbal tradition carried through ages some proverbs and sayings coming from the times of the Khazar Kaghanate.
S. Tokarev wrote that:
A modern interpretation was proposed that "from the Turkified Lezgins, Kumyks also emerged".
However, professor of Caucasus studies L. Lavrov doubted the "Turkification" hypothesis of Kumyk origin: Another prominent Russian Orientalist, V. Minorsky, proposed his adjustment to the views mentioned, stating that:
The final stages of the Kumyk ethnogenesis stretched from the 12th-17th centuries.
Some of the Turkic peoples who assimilated into the Kumyk nation were those of Tumens from the Tumen Khanate (Caucasian Tumen), which emerged in the 15th century as a fragment of the dissolved Golden Horde; those of Bothe Bogans, Sople and pre-Cuman Turks, who populated the Botheragan-Madjar region in the 7th century, which encompassed the vast North Caucasian plains.
History
Kumyks historically were related to the states of the Caucasian Huns, Cuman-Kipchaks, and the Golden Horde.
The beginning of the Kumyk nation is often considered to be in the Khazar Kaganate era.