Siberian Turkic

Siberian Turkic, or Northeastern Common Turkic, is the northernmost branch of the Turkic family, spanning the Sayan and Altai mountains and reaching with Sakha, or Yakut, down the Lena. The oldest attested member is Old Turkic, cut in runiform script on the Orkhon steles of 732 and 735 and later written in the Old Uyghur alphabet.

The Sakha separated early; from the 1200s Mongol pressure drove their herdsmen from Lake Baikal to the Lena, Aldan and Vilyuy, where Sakha became the regional lingua franca.

In the 1620s Muscovy advanced into the taiga, imposing the fur yasak and crushing Yakut revolts between 1634 and 1642. War and smallpox cut the Sakha population by some seventy percent by 1682; by the 1820s nearly all were formally Orthodox Christians while keeping older Tengrist customs.