Southern Khanty is a Uralic language, frequently considered a dialect of a unified Khanty language, spoken by 56 people in 2010. It is considered to be extinct, its speakers having shifted starting in the 18th century to Russian or Siberian Tatar, but some speakers of the Kyshikov or Ust-Nazym dialect were found in its former territory. Speakers of Surgut Khanty have moved into the former territory of the Demyanka dialect. It was transitional between the Northern Khanty and Eastern Khanty dialect groups, but it is now a distinct language.
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Southern Khanty language in the context of Khanty languages
Khanty (also spelled Khanti or Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (/ˈɒstjæk/), is a branch of the Ugric languages composed of multiple dialect continua. It is varyingly considered a language or a collection of distinct languages spoken in the Khanty-Mansi and the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrugs in Siberia. It belongs to the wider Uralic language family. There were thought to be around 7,500 speakers of Northern Khanty and 2,000 speakers of Eastern Khanty in 2010, with Southern Khanty being extinct since the early 20th century. The number of speakers reported in the 2020 census was 13,900.
The Khanty language has many dialects. The western group includes the Obdorian, Ob, and Irtysh dialects. The eastern group includes the Surgut and Vakh-Vasyugan dialects, which in turn are subdivided into 13 other dialects. All these dialects differ significantly from each other by phonetic, morphological, and lexical features to the extent that the three main "dialects" (northern, southern and eastern) are mutually unintelligible. Thus, based on their significant multifactorial differences, Eastern, Northern and Southern Khanty may be considered separate but closely related languages.