Soyot
ethnic group
The Soyot are an ethnic group who mainly live in the Oka region in the Okinsky District in Buryatia, Russia. They share much of their history with the Tofalar, Tozhu Tuvans, Dukha, and Buryat; the Soyot have taken on a great deal of Buryat cultural influence and were grouped together with them under Soviet policy. Due to intermarriage between Soyots and Buryats, the Soyot population is heavily mixed with the Buryat. In 2000, they were reinstated as a distinct ethnic group.
Like other taiga peoples, the Soyot traditionally practiced reindeer breeding and hunting and lived nomadically, but today most Soyot live in villages. According to the 2021 census, there were 4,368 Soyots in Russia.
The Soyot language is Turkic, and closely corresponds with the Tofalar language; most Soyot spoke Buryat during Russian rule, but following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been an active effort to revitalize the formerly extinct Soyot language.
Etymology
The name Soyot is from the endonym 'soyyt.' The Buryat call them 'hoyod' and the Tofalar call them 'hazut' which is derived from the name of the largest Soyot clan, the Khaazuut.
History
Origin
According to Larisa R. Pavlinskaya, a Russian ethnographer based in St. Petersburg, Russia, the ancestor of the Soyots (and the closely related Tofalars, Tozhu Tuvans, and Dukha) were proto-Samoyedic hunter-gatherers who arrived in the Eastern Sayan region from Western Siberia at the end of the third millennium BC and the beginning of the second millennium BC. At the beginning the first millennium AD, Turkic speaking cattle and horse breeders migrated from the Inner Asian steppes and would go on to significantly influence the Samoyedic, Ket, and Tungus populations of the Eastern Sayan Mountains.
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This entry incorporates text from “Soyot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.