In the transboundary conditions of the globalizing world, the Buryat language found itself in a difficult situation: territorial dispersion and dialectal fragmentation causing a rapid decrease in the number of active speakers and narrowing the scope of its application. The sociological survey (2015– 2017) conducted among Buryat schoolchildren in Russia, Mongolia and China shows that even those who consider Buryat their native language and have known it since childhood, use mainly the majority language of the ethnic majority outside the narrow family circle. Today the family remains practically the only agent for preserving the Buryat language and its transmission to the next generation. The school, on the other hand, performs rather an auxiliary function: it hinders the process of linguistic assimilation of children and adolescents – active speakers of the Buryat language.