The Kalmyks are an ethnolinguistic group belonging to a larger group of Mongols known as the Oirats. Once a confederation of nomadic states, since the 18th century the Oirats have been scattered as ethnic minorities in Mongolia, China, and Russia.
In the 17th century, a subgroup of the Oirat, the Torghuts, founded the Kalmyk Khanate in the Lower Volga River region. Traditionally, Kalmyks were engaged in mobile pastoralism, perfectly suited for the vast steppe climate of their territories.
In 1920, the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast was formed, later becoming the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1935. As a result of the Russian Civil War and Stalinist repression in the 1920s and 1930s, the population of Kalmykia was almost halved. The Siberian exile of 1943–1957, which resulted in the death of nearly one-third of the entire population, inflicted irreversible demographic and cultural losses.
Before the October Revolution, there were over a hundred khuruls (Kalmyk Buddhist temples) where 2,700 Buddhist monks lived and served. By 1940, all khuruls had been destroyed and the monks repressed. One of the few survivors, the Kalmyk monk Geshe Vangyal (1901–1983), became one of the first teachers of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States.
Historically, the Kalmyk-American diaspora was formed by immigrants escaping the Russian Revolution and World War II. The main Kalmyk settlement was Howell, New Jersey.
Халмг келəн (hal'mg kelän), also known as Kalmyk-Oirat or simply Kalmyk, is a Mongolic language spoken primarily in the Republic of Kalmykia in the Russian Federation. According to a 2010 census, of the 170,000 ethnic Kalmyks living in the Russian Federation, there were an estimated 80,000 native speakers. More recent numbers, as well as the vitality of Kalmyk in the Kalmyk-American diasporic community, are unknown.
The Kalmyk language has survived many challenges, including the devastating exile of its people to Siberia in 1943–1957, which resulted in many lives lost. In 1924, the Soviet state abolished the original Kalmyk writing system known as todo bichig, created by Zaya-Pandita, and replaced it with Latin, and eventually with Cyrillic. More recently, in 2018, officials made studying Kalmyk as part of the school curriculum in Kalmykia optional. Most Kalmyk speakers today are bilingual in Russian, and a majority of them are elderly.