Crimean Tatars are a Turkic ethnic group native to the Crimean peninsula.

They forms the majority population in Crimea from the time of their ethnogenesis in the 15th century until their 1944 deportation under Soviet rule.Crimean Tatars are allowed to return to Crimea in the 1980s, where they now form a 10% minority.

There remains a large diaspora of Crimean Tatars in Turkey and Uzbekistan.The Crimean Tatar language is of Kipchak stock, and a such related to the Tatar language spoken by the Volga Tatars, with which it is however not mutually intelligible, as Crimean Tatar is strongly influenced by Ottoman Turkish during the 15th to 18th centuries, and Crimean Tatars in the early 20th centuries consider them ethnically Turkish rather than Tatar.