Erzya

Also known as Erzya language, Erzyan language, Erzya-Mordvin

Uralic language spoken in Russia

AI overview

Erzya is a Uralic language spoken primarily in Russia, belonging to the same language family as Finnish and Hungarian. It matters because it represents an important part of linguistic and cultural diversity, though like many minority languages it faces challenges in the modern world.

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Wikidata facts

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short name: эрзяйаг
Wikimedia language code: myv
native label: Эрзянь кель
number of speakers, writers, or signers: 36700
Commons category: Erzya language
P10369: Walloon Region
described at URL: uralic.clld.org/languages/20

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Article

Erzya flag The Erzya language (эрзянь кель, eŕźań keĺ, pronounced [ˈerʲzʲanʲ ˈkʲelʲ]), also Erzian or historically Arisa, is spoken by approximately 300,000 people in the northern, eastern and north-western parts of the Republic of Mordovia and adjacent regions of Nizhny Novgorod, Chuvashia, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in Russia. A diaspora can also be found in Armenia and Estonia, as well as in Kazakhstan and other states of Central Asia. Erzya is currently written using Cyrillic with no modifications to the variant used by the Russian language. In Mordovia, Erzya is co-official with Moksha and Russian.

The language belongs to the Mordvinic branch of the Uralic languages. Erzya is a language that is closely related to Moksha but has distinct phonetics, morphology and vocabulary.