There were 755,782 Chechen at the time of the 1979 census (a figure that has increased since that time, and which had more than doubled from the 1926 figure of 318, 522), making the Chechen the largest ethnic group of the North Caucasus and the largest indigenous Caucasian group after the Georgians. Chechen is spoken in a sizable area in the eastern central part of the North Caucasus: the eastern and central Chechen-Ingush ASSR, with outliers in northwestern Daghestan and northeastern Georgia.