The Circassians, also known as the Cherkess or the Adyghe, are a Northwest Caucasian ethnic group native to Circassia, a region and former country in the North Caucasus. As a consequence of the 19th-century Russo-Circassian War and the Circassian genocide, most Circassians were exiled from their homeland and scattered in what was then the Ottoman Empire. The two Circassian languages natively spoken by the Circassian people are western Adyghe and eastern Kabardian. The Ubykh language went extinct with the 1992 death of its last speaker, Tevfik Esenç.