Erzya language
The Erzya language (эрзянь кель, eŕźań keĺ, pronounced [ˈerʲzʲanʲ ˈkelʲ]), 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.
| Erzya | |
|---|---|
| eŕźań keĺ | |
| эрзянь кель | |
| Native to | Russia |
| Region | Mordovia, Nizhny Novgorod, Chuvashia, Ulyanovsk, Samara, Penza, Saratov, Orenburg, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan |
| Ethnicity | 610,000 (553,000 in Russia, 2010 census) |
Native speakers | 300,000 claimed to speak "Mordovin" while 50,000 claimed to speak "Erzya-Mordvin" (2020 census) |
| Cyrillic | |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Mordovia (Russia) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | myv |
| ISO 639-3 | myv |
| Glottolog | erzy1239 |
| ELP | Erzya |
Mordvin languages at the beginning of the 20th century | |
Erzya is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010) | |
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.