Tuoba and Xianbei: Turkic and Mongolic elements of the medieval and contemporary Sinitic states

Since this lengthy post is chiefly about a group called Tuoba, supposedly a clan of a people called Xianbei, and because it is a very thorny and complicated issue having contemporary political implications, we had better gain a modicum of familiarity with who the Tuoba and Xianbei were, as well as where and when they lived. Nomadic confederations of Inner Asia were often linguistically diverse, and Tuoba Wei comprised the para-Mongolic Tuoba as well as assimilated Turkic peoples such as Hegu and Yizhan; consequently, about one quarter of the Tuoba tribal confederation was composed of Dingling elements as Tuoba migrated from northeastern Mongolia to northern China. Alexander Vovin identifies the Tuoba language as a Mongolic language. On the other hand, Juha Janhunen proposed that the Tuoba might have spoken an Oghur Turkic language René Grousset, writing in the early 20th century, identifies the Tuoba as a Turkic tribe. According to Peter Boodberg, a 20th-century scholar, the Tuoba language was essentially Turkic with Mongolic admixture. Chen Sanping observed that the Tuoba language contains both elements. The Northern Wei also arranged for ethnic Han elites to marry daughters of the Tuoba imperial clan in the 480s. More than fifty percent of Tuoba Xianbei princesses of the Northern Wei were married to southern Han men from the imperial families and aristocrats from southern China of the Southern dynasties who defected and moved north to join the Northern Wei.