Buryat (Buriat) (Buryat Cyrillic: буряад хэлэн, buryād xelen) 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.
