[2] It is the most widely spoken out of all the Khanty languages, the majority composed of 5,000 speakers in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, in Russia.

[4] The Shuryshkar dialects are also written, primarily due to an administrative division between the two, as the latter is spoken in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.

[7][8] A similarly simple vowel inventory is found in the Nizyam, Sherkal, and Berjozov dialects, which have full /e a ɒ u/ and reduced /ĭ ɑ̆ ŏ ŭ/.

The influential Просвещение [ru] (Enlightenment/Education) publishing house, which publishes many of the textbooks and early literacy material for the smaller languages of Russia, designed curved-tail variants of the letters ԯ and ң with a tick, namely ԓ and ӈ, and these have been redundantly encoded in Unicode as separate characters.

[13] However, the respected Khanty-language journal Хӑнты ясӑӊ [ru] uses the diagonal-tail forms ӆ and ӊ for Kazym.