Buryats

The Buryats are a Mongol ethnic group indigenous to south‑eastern Siberia and northernmost Mongolia who speak the Buryat language or Buryat-Mongol dialect of Mongolian. They form one of the two principal indigenous groups in Siberia, the other being the Yakuts. The majority of Buryats today live in their titular homeland, the Republic of Buryatia, a federal subject of Russia that extends along the southern fringe of the country and partially straddles Lake Baikal. Smaller Buryat populations also inhabit Ust-Orda Buryat Okrug (Irkutsk Oblast) and the Agin-Buryat Autonomous Okrug (Zabaykalsky Krai), which lie to the west and east of Buryatia respectively, as well as north‑eastern Mongolia, and Inner Mongolia in China. Traditionally, they constituted the major northern subgroup of the Mongols. The Buryats share many customs with other Mongolic peoples, among them nomadic herding and the use of gers for shelter. Today the majority of Buryats reside in and around Ulan-Ude, the capital of the Buryat Republic, though many still follow a more traditional way of life in the countryside. They speak a central Mongolic language called Buryat. UNESCO's 2010 edition of the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classifies the Buryat language as "severely endangered".