[iliveinchina]

The point is these areas are still pretty actively Tibetan today, not just historically.

Is there a contiguous region stretching from Mongolia deep into the Middle East and to Europe where a high percentage of the population (like a quarter or more) speaks Mongolian as their native language?

I know that might be true for a small area surrounding Mongolia in Russia, but I think the comparison stretching into the Middle East and Europe is not accurate.

Qinghai is still almost a quarter Tibetan (a percentage that has probably been consistently shrinking in recent history due to migration) and is almost as large, area-wise, as the formal Tibetan autonomous region.

[platinumrad]

The dedicated Turanist will talk your ear off about linguistic co-evolution, haplogroups, and so on, but no, of course not. The example was deliberately outlandish. A quarter is lower than the proportion of Russians in Crimea.

I think we may ultimately be making the same point, that political borders are by nature artificial and often fail to reflect the historical fluidity of culture and ethnicity, but I objected to the perceived implication that these regions are uniquely Tibetan.