• 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

Kalmyk

Kalmyk (хальмг келн, xal’mg keln) is a Western Mongolic language spoken mainly in the Republic of Kalmykia (Russian Federation, lower Volga region). The total number of native speakers of Kalmyk is ca. 162 000 (according to the 2010 census), a large proportion of the Kalmyks lost their native language mainly due to the 13-year long deportation to Siberia and linguistic assimilation. According to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Kalmyk is identified as an endangered language.

The ‘Clear Script’ todo bicig was created by the Oirat Buddhist monk Zaya Pandita in 1648. It based on the Old Script, the Classical Mongolian script, that was expanded by new letters and diacritics. Since 1918, Kalmyks have been using the Cyrillic alphabet with the exception of the short period from 1931 to 1939 when the Cyrillic alphabet was replaced by the Latin one.