It was spoken in the northern region of the Sayan Mountains in Siberia, close to the Mongolian north border.

The speakers of Mator, Matorians or Mators [ru], lived in a wide area from the eastern parts of the Minusinsk District (okrug) along the Yenisei River to the region of Lake Baikal.

[3][page needed] It went extinct as a result of the Mator people shifting linguistically to the related Kamas language or nearby Altaic-sprachbund languages, like Buryat, Soyot, Khakas, Evenki and Tatar.

[4] Today the term "Mator people" is simply a name of a seok of the Koibal, one of the five territorial sub-division groups of the Khakas.

This is however a grouping by geographical area, and not considered to constitute an actual sub-branch of the Samoyedic languages.