Udmurt language
Udmurt (/ʊdˈmʊərt/; Cyrillic: Удмурт) is a Permic language spoken by the Udmurt people who are native to Udmurtia. As a Uralic language, it is distantly related to languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Mansi, Khanty, and Hungarian. The Udmurt language is co-official with Russian within Udmurtia.
| Udmurt | |
|---|---|
| Удмурт кыл Udmurt kyl | |
| Native to | Russia |
| Region | Udmurtia |
| Ethnicity | Udmurts |
Native speakers | 270,000 (2020 census) |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Russia |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | udm |
| ISO 639-3 | udm |
| Glottolog | udmu1245 |
| ELP | Udmurt |
Distribution of Udmurt dialects at the beginning of 21st century | |
Udmurt is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger (2010) | |
It is written using the Cyrillic alphabet with the addition of five characters not used in the Russian alphabet: Ӝ/ӝ, Ӟ/ӟ, Ӥ/ӥ, Ӧ/ӧ, and Ӵ/ӵ. Together with the Komi and Permyak languages, it constitutes the Permic grouping of the Uralic family. Among outsiders, it has traditionally been referred to by its Russian exonym, Votyak. Udmurt has borrowed vocabulary from neighboring languages, mainly from Tatar and Russian.
In 2010, per the Russian census, there were around 324,000 speakers of the language in the country, out of the ethnic population of roughly 554,000. Ethnologue estimated that there were 550,000 native speakers (77%) out of an ethnic population of 750,000 in the former Russian SFSR (1989 census), a decline of roughly 41% in 21 years.