• INTRODUCTION
  • About the project
  • Participating researchers
• ENCYCLOPEDIC SECTION
  • Mongolic languages
  • Khalkha
  • Buryat
  • Kalmyk
  • Useful links
• LINGUISTIC SECTION
  • Adverbial Corpus
  • Concordance
  • Transliteration
  • Grammar Notes
  • Noun
  • Verb
  • Negation
  • Particles
  • Differential object and subject marking
  • Mirativity
  • Bibliography
  • Downloads

Buryat

Buryat (буряад хэлэн, buryaad xelen)is a Northern Mongolic language presently spoken by ca. 363,000 people out of an ethnic population of 461,389 (according to the 2010 census).

The Buryats are divided among three administrative units of the Russian Federation: the Buryat Republic (capital Ulaan-Ude), the Aga National District in the Chita region, and the Ust'-Orda National District in Irkutsk Province. Additionally, about 100,000 ethnic Buryats live in Mongolia and China (the Bargu-Buryats of Inner Mongolia). The Buryats, as opposed to Khalkha-Mongols, are bilingual; the general trend is that Buryat is being abandoned in favour of more dominant languages - Russian and Chinese.

Eastern Buryats used the Old Script till the 1930s; for Western Buryat dialects an adaptation of it was suggested by the Lhama Agvan Dorzhiev at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1930-1939, orthography based on the Latin alphabet was used and was changed to Cyrillic in 1937.