Buryat (Buriat) (Buryat Cyrillic: буряад хэлэн;
buryaad khelen) is a variety of
Mongolic spoken by the
Buryats that is classified either as a language or as a major dialect group of
Mongolian. The majority of Buryat speakers live in
Russia along the northern border of
Mongolia where it is an official language in the
Buryat Republic,
Ust-Orda Buryatia and
Aga Buryatia. In the Russian census of 2002, 353,113 people out of an ethnic population of 445,175 reported speaking Buryat (72.3%). Some other 15,694 can also speak Buryat, mostly ethnic Russians. There are at least 100,000 ethnic Buryats in
Mongolia and the
People's Republic of China as well. Buryats in Russia have a separate
literary standard, written in a Cyrillic alphabet. It is based on the Russian alphabet with three additional letters: Ү/ү, Ө/ө and Һ/һ.