The debate over how much Volga Tatars should be seen as descendants of the Volga Bulgars and how much they should be seen as descendants of the Golden Horde, is something that will come up loudly at any academic conference on ethnography or linguistics in Tatarstan. Virtually everyone agrees that the modern Tatar people are mostly descendents of the Volga Bulgars (or Udmurts) who lived there before 1236, they just switched fron speaking Volga Bulgarian (or Udmurt) to Kipchak. But Tatar intellectuals can get oddly insistent about which aspect of Tatars' history should be emphasized more.