Ossetic language, eastern Iranianlanguage spoken in the northernCaucasus by the Ossetes. There are two major dialects: (1) eastern, called Iron, and (2) western, calledDigor. The majority of the Ossetes speak Iron, which is the basis of the literary language now written in theCyrillic alphabet. Ossetic is the modern descendant of the language of the ancientAlani, aSarmatian people, and themedieval As. It preserves manyarchaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes. Thephonology of the language has been greatly influenced by the non-Indo-European languages of the Caucasus, and the present vocabulary has many loanwords from Russian. There are many folk epics in Ossetic; the most famous are the tales about hero warriors, the Narts. The literary language was established by the national poetKosta Khetagurov (1859–1906).