Soyot

The Soyot are a Turkic-speaking reindeer people of the Eastern Sayans, around the Oka River southwest of Lake Baikal. Their proto-Samoyedic ancestors absorbed Turkic pastoralists in the first millennium, adopting a Turkic language while retreating into the high taiga, where they lived by reindeer breeding, mounted hunting and the fur trade.

Around the seventeenth century a group moved north from Lake Khövsgöl into the Oka basin. Russian Cossacks reached the Eastern Sayans in the mid-1600s and had full control by the early 1700s; after the Treaty of Kiakhta in 1727 Buryat families were settled along the Chinese border, and Buryat influence grew.

From the mid-1700s Tibetan Buddhism spread alongside older shamanic cults. By the late 1800s the Buryat language and cattle breeding had largely displaced the Soyot tongue and reindeer herding, leaving the Soyot heavily mixed with the Buryat.