[4][5][6][7] The majority of these speakers speak the Surgut dialect, as the Vakh-Vasyugan and Salym varieties have been rapidly declining in favor of Russian.

[8] The former two have been used as literary languages since the late 20th century, with Surgut being more widely used due to its less isolated location and higher number of speakers.

The Atlym and Nizyam dialects also show some Southern features.

Eastern Khanty [k] corresponds to [x] in the northern and southern languages.

However, in the case of Surgut such graphic variation needs to be handled by the font, because there are no Unicode characters to hard-code Ҷ with a diagonal tail, and Unicode has refused a request to encode a variant of Ҷ with a curved tail ( , approximated in unicode as Ч̡ч̡), the reasoning being that it would be an allograph rather than a distinct letter.