The Ubykh people were a group who spoke the Northwest Caucasian Ubykh language, up until 1992.

The Ubykh used to inhabit an area just northwest of Abkhazia in the Caucasus. They were probably one of the populations to inhabit the ancient nation of Colchis, and some of the people involved in the myth of the Golden Fleece may have been Ubykh speakers. Outside of mythology, the ancestors of the Ubykh were mentioned in book IV of Procopius' De Bello Gotico (The Gothic War), under the name βρου̃χοι (Brouchoi) , a corruption of the native term t^waχ.

However, the Ubykh people gained more prominence in modern times. In 1864, during the reign of the tsar Alexander II, Georgia and Abkhazia were invaded by the Russian army. The Adyghe and Abkhazian peoples were decimated, and the Abaza people were partially driven out of the Caucasus. But the result on the Ubykh people was much more widespread; the Ubykh nation was given a month to get out of the Caucasus or be subjugated by the Russian army. Deciding to leave free rather than stay and be ruled, the entire Ubykh nation left the Caucasus en masse and eventually settled in Turkey.

The Ubykh elders decided that it would be best if the Ubykh people were to assimilate into Turkish culture, since they would not be discriminated against. They shifted from being a nomadic horseback culture (supported by their language, which still has a finely differentiated vocabulary for horses and tack) to becoming a culture of farmers, eventually settling in a number of villages around the municipality of Manyas . The Ubykh language was displaced by Turkish and Circassian, and the last speaker of Ubykh, Tevfik Esenc, died in 1992.

Today, the Ubykh diaspora has been scattered into Russia, Turkey, and to a much lesser extent, Abkhazia. The Ubykh nation per se no longer exists, although those who are of Ubykh ancestry are proud to call themselves Ubykh, and a couple of villages are still found in Turkey where the vast majority of the population is still Ubykh.

Ubykh society was patrilineal; many Ubykhs, even today, know five, six, or even seven generations of their agnatic ancestry.