There were 186,198 Ingush at the time of the 1979 census, a figure that has no doubt increased in the intervening decade. Ingush is spoken in the western part of the Chechen-Ingush ASSR and the eastern part of the North Ossetic ASSR. Ingush is very closely related to Chechen, and the two languages form a single speech community with most speakers of each language having at least a passive command of the other. This sketch describes a variant of Ingush that is maximally different from Chechen, in order to increase diversity between the Chechen and Ingush sketches and insure that they cover the greatest possible range within the speech community.

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.