Kalmyk Oirat , commonly known as the
Kalmyk language is a
register of the
Oirat language, natively spoken by the
Kalmyk people of
Kalmykia, a federal subject of
Russia. In Russia, it is the
normative form of the
Oirat language (based on the
Torgut dialect), which belongs to the
Mongolic language family. The
Kalmyk people of the northwest
Caspian Sea of Russia claim descent from the
Oirats from
Eurasia, who have also historically settled in
Mongolia and
northwest China. According to
UNESCO, the language is "Definitely endangered". According to the Russian census of 2010, there are 80,500 speakers of an
ethnic population consisting of 183,000 people.