It is spoken by around 750,000 native speakers in Russia, as well as in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other neighboring post-Soviet states, and among the Bashkir diaspora.

Many speakers also live in Tatarstan, Chelyabinsk, Orenburg, Tyumen, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan Oblasts and other regions of Russia.

Bashkir together with Tatar belongs to the Kipchak-Bulgar (Russian: кыпчакско-булгарская) subgroup of the Kipchak languages.

[6] Барлыҡ кешеләр ирекле, дәрәжәләре һәм хоҡуҡтары тигеҙ булып тыуалар.

In 1923, a writing system based on the Arabic script was specifically created for the Bashkir language.

At the same time, the Bashkir literary language was created, moving away from the older written Turkic influences.

The modern alphabet used by Bashkir is based on the Russian alphabet, with the addition of the following letters: Ә ә /æ/, Ө ө /ø/, Ү ү /ʏ/, Ғ ғ /ʁ/, Ҡ ҡ /q/, Ң ң /ŋ/, Ҙ ҙ /ð/, Ҫ ҫ /θ/, Һ һ /h/.

[7] Phonetically, the native vowels are approximately thus (with the Cyrillic letter followed by the usual Latin romanization in angle brackets):[8] In Russian loans there are also [ɨ], [ɛ], [ɔ] and [ä], written the same as the native vowels: ы, е/э, о, а respectively.