Ob-Ugrian

Ob-Ugrian is the Ugric division of the Uralic family that groups Khanty, formerly called Ostyak, and Mansi, formerly called Vogul; with Hungarian, whose speakers split off in the eleventh century BC, they form the Ugric branch. Its peoples live between the Urals and the Ob and Irtysh rivers, while the southern Urals are regarded as the older Ugric homeland.

Both Khanty and Mansi are clusters of highly divergent, often mutually unintelligible dialects. Turkic neighbours, above all the Tatars, left a deep lexical imprint.

After the Cossack ataman Yermak overthrew the Tatar Khanate of Sibir at Qashliq in 1582, the Russian conquest pushed the Ob-Ugrian peoples eastward onto the Ob and Irtysh; in the eighteenth century some Mansi still lived west of the mountains. Their languages remained without a writing system throughout this period.