Ossetic or Ossetian (Ossetic: Ирон, tr. Iron), also sometimes called Ossete, is an East Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.

The area in Russia is known as North Ossetia–Alania, while the area south of the border is referred to as South Ossetia, recognized by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Nauru as an independent state but by the rest of the international community as part of Georgia. Ossetian speakers number about 525,000, sixty percent of whom live in North Ossetia, and ten percent in South Ossetia.^{[citation needed]}

Ossetian is the spoken and literary language of the Ossetes, a people living in the central part of the Caucasus and constituting the basic population of the republic of North Ossetia–Alania, which belongs to the Russian Federation, and of the South Ossetia, which is de facto independent (belongs to the Georgian Republic according to most other states). Ossetian belongs to the Northern subgroup of the Eastern-Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages. Thus, it is genetically related to the other Eastern-Iranian languages, e.g. Pashto and Yaghnobi.