Northern Khanty language

Northern Khanty is a Uralic language, frequently considered a dialect of a unified Khanty language, spoken by about 9,000 people. It is the most widely spoken out of all the Khanty languages, the majority composed of 5,000 speakers in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in Russia. The reason for this discrepancy is that dialects of Northern Khanty have been better preserved in its northern reaches, and the Middle Ob and Kazym dialects are losing favor to Russian. All four dialects have been literary, beginning with the Middle Ob dialects, but shifting to Kazym, and back to Middle Ob, now the most used dialect in writing. The Shuryshkar dialects are also written, primarily due to an administrative division between the two, as the latter is spoken in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.