The Kalmyk language (Хальмг келн; also known as Kalmuck, Qalmaq, Khal:mag and Western Mongol), or Russian Oirat, is the native speech of the Kalmyk people of the Republic of Kalmykia, a federal subject of the Russian Federation. In Russia, it is the normative form of the Oirat language (based on the Torgut dialect), which belongs to the Mongolic language family. The Oirat people are scattered throughout Eurasia, with substantial groups located in western Mongolia, the northwest region (mainly Xinjiang) of the People’s Republic of China and the northwest coast of the Caspian Sea in the Russian Federation, where they became known as Kalmyks.
Kalmyk is now only spoken as a native language by a small minority of the Kalmyk population[citation needed]. Its decline as a living language began after the Kalmyk people were deported en masse from their homeland in December 1943, having been accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Significant factors contributing to its demise include: (1) the deaths of a substantial percentage of the Kalmyk population from disease and malnutrition, both during their travel and upon their arrival to remote exile settlements in Central Asia, south central Siberia and the Soviet Far East; (2) the wide dispersal of the Kalmyk population; (3) the duration of exile, which ended in 1957; (4) the stigma associated with being falsely accused of treason, and (5) assimilation into the larger, more dominant culture. Collectively, these factors discontinued the intergenerational language transmission.
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