Their closest historical and linguistic relatives, the Jász people, live in the Jászság region within the northwestern part of the Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County of Hungary.

The name Ossetians and Ossetia comes from the Russians, who borrowed the Georgian term Oseti (ოსეთი – note the personal pronoun), which means 'the land of the Osi'.

This, combined with the effects of the Georgian–Ossetian conflict, led to the popularization of Alania, the name of the medieval Sarmatian confederation, to which the Ossetians traced their origin and to the inclusion of this name into the official republican title of North Ossetia in 1994.

Ovsi, Ovseti), documented in the Georgian Chronicles; the long length of the initial vowel or the gemination of the consonant s in some forms (NPers.

Aas, Assi); and by the Armenian ethnic name *Awsowrk' (Ōsur-), probably derived from a cognate preserved in the Jassic term *Jaszok, referring to the branch of the Iazyges Alanic tribe dwelling near modern Georgia by the time of Anania Shirakatsi (7th century AD).

[43] The native beliefs of the Ossetian people are rooted in their Sarmatian origin, which have been syncretized with a local variant of Folk Orthodoxy, in which some pagan gods have been converted into Christian saints.

[38] The Sarmatians were the only branch of the Alans to keep their culture in the face of a Gothic invasion (c. 200 AD) and those who remained built a great kingdom between the Don and Volga Rivers, according to Coon, The Races of Europe.

A few fled to the west, where they participated in the Barbarian Invasions of Rome, established short-lived kingdoms in Spain and North Africa and settled in many other places such as Orléans, France, Iași, Romania, Alenquer, Portugal and Jászberény, Hungary.

[citation needed] In the 8th century, a consolidated Alan kingdom, referred to in sources of the period as Alania, emerged in the northern Caucasus Mountains, roughly in the location of the latter-day Circassia and the modern North Ossetia–Alania.

[49] After the Mongol invasions of the 1200s, the Alans migrated further into Caucasus Mountains, where they would form three ethnographical groups; the Iron, the Digoron and the Kudar.

However, most of the missionaries chosen were churchmen from Eastern Orthodox communities living in Georgia, including Armenians and Greeks, as well as ethnic Georgians.

[69] Ossetians have also settled in Belgium, France, Sweden, the United States (primarily New York City, Florida and California), Canada (Toronto), Australia (Sydney) and other countries all around the world.

In a 2014 study by V. V. Ilyinsky on bone fragments from ten Alanic burials along the Don River, DNA analysis was successfully performed on seven samples.

This evidence challenges alternative theories, such as Ossetians being Caucasian speakers assimilated by the Alans, reinforcing that Haplogroup G2 is central to their genetic lineage.