The Altaians are a Siberian Turkic-speaking people living in the Altai Republic of the Russian Federation and adjoining regions. In 1989, they numbered over seventy thousand. The ethnonym "Altaian" (Altai, Altai Kizhi, "Altai person," Russ. Altaĭtsiĭ), although used as early as the 1840s, was adopted in the twentieth century to denote a number of Siberian Turkic groups of complex and partly distinct origins (including Samoyed, Kettic, and Mongolian elements), merged by Soviet nationality policies into the "Altai nation." In the early twentieth century, nationalist Altaian intellectuals preferred the ethnonym