The Tunguses (nearly 70,000) occupy as their hunting-grounds an immense region on the high plateau and its slopes to the Amur, but their limits are yearly becoming more and more circumscribed both by Russian gold-diggers and by Yakut settlers.
Yakutsk is thoroughly Yakutic; marriages of Russians with Yakut wives are common, and in the middle of the 19th century the Yakut language was predominant among the Russian merchants and officials.
4 Istakhri p. 91; Yakut ii.
Arabic: The account of Ibn Fadlan (921) is preserved by Yakut, ii.
406-410, and, besides the authorities there cited, Yakut, s.v.; Hamdani p. 52; Kazwini ii.
A century later, in the time of Alexander 11 Yakut gives the name Sal' to a fortress in Wadi Musa, Noldeke, ZDMG.
(8) The Cholym or Chulym Tatars on the Cholym and both the rivers Yus speak a Turkish language with many Mongol and Yakut words, and are more like Mongols than Turks.
