Udmurt language
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Udmurt is a
Permic The Permic or Permian languages are a branch of the Uralic language family. They are spoken in several regions to the west of the Ural Mountains within the Russian Federation. The total number of speakers is around 950,000, of which around 550,00 ...
language spoken by the
Udmurt people The Udmurts ( udm, Удмуртъёс, ) are a Permian ( Finnic) ethnic group in Eastern Europe, who speak the Udmurt language. In the course of history, Russian-speakers have referred to them as ' (), Otyaks, Wotyaks or Votyaks. Etymology The ...
who are native to
Udmurtia Udmurtia (russian: Удму́ртия, r=Udmúrtiya, p=ʊˈdmurtʲɪjə; udm, Удмуртия, ''Udmurtija''), or the Udmurt Republic (russian: Удмуртская Республика, udm, Удмурт Республика, Удмурт ...
. As a
Uralic The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...
language, it is distantly related to languages such as
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
, Estonian,
Mansi Mansi may refer to: People * Mansi people, an indigenous people living in Tyumen Oblast, Russia ** Mansi language * Giovanni Domenico Mansi Gian (Giovanni) Domenico Mansi (16 February 1692 – 27 September 1769) was an Italian prelate, theolog ...
,
Khanty The Khanty ( Khanty: ханти, ''hanti''), also known in older literature as Ostyaks (russian: остяки) are a Ugric indigenous people, living in Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, a region historically known as "Yugra" in Russia, togethe ...
, and Hungarian. The Udmurt language is co-official with
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
within Udmurtia. It is written using the
Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...
alphabet with the addition of five characters not used in the
Russian alphabet The Russian alphabet (russian: ру́сский алфави́т, russkiy alfavit, , label=none, or russian: ру́сская а́збука, russkaya azbuka, label=none, more traditionally) is the script used to write the Russian language. I ...
: 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 Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...
. Among outsiders, it has traditionally been referred to by its Russian
exonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
, Votyak. Udmurt has borrowed vocabulary from neighboring languages, mainly from
Tatar The Tatars ()Tatar
in the Collins English Dictionary
is an umbrella term for different
and
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
. In 2010, as 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 ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
estimated that there were 550,000 native speakers (77%) out of an ethnic population of 750,000 in the former
Russian SFSR The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Russian SFSR or RSFSR ( rus, Российская Советская Федеративная Социалистическая Республика, Rossíyskaya Sovétskaya Federatívnaya Soci ...
(1989 census), a decline of roughly 41% in 21 years.


Dialects

Udmurt varieties can be grouped in three broad dialect groups: * Northern Udmurt, spoken along the
Cheptsa River The Cheptsa (; udm, Чупчи) is a river in the north part of Udmurtian Republic (Udmurtia) and eastern Kirov Oblast, in Russia. It flows through the city Glazov and flows into the Vyatka (river), Vyatka in Kirovo-Chepetsk, east of Kirov, Kiro ...
* Southern Udmurt * Besermyan, spoken by the strongly Turkified Besermyans A continuum of intermediate dialects between Northern and Southern Udmurt is found, and literary Udmurt includes features from both areas. Besermyan is more sharply distinguished. The differences between the dialects are regardless not major and mainly involve differences in vocabulary, largely attributable to the stronger influence of Tatar in the southern end of the Udmurt-speaking area. A few differences in morphology and phonology still exist as well; for example: * Southern Udmurt has an accusative ending ''-ыз'' , contrasting with northern ''-ты'' . * Southwestern Udmurt distinguishes an eighth vowel phoneme . * Besermyan has in place of standard Udmurt (thus distinguishing only six vowel phonemes), and in place of standard Udmurt .


Orthography

Udmurt is written using a modified version of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet:


Phonology

Unlike other Uralic languages such as
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
and Hungarian, Udmurt does not distinguish between long and short vowels and does not have
vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...
.


Consonants

The consonants are restricted to loanwords, and are traditionally replaced by respectively. As in Hungarian, Udmurt exhibits regressive voicing and devoicing assimilations (the last element determines the assimilation), but with some exceptions (mostly to distinguish minimal pairs by voicing).


Vowels


Grammar

] Udmurt is an
agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remai ...
language. It uses
affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ar ...
es to express possession, to specify mode, time, and so on. No gender distinction is made in
noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...
s or personal pronouns.


Cases

Udmurt has fifteen cases: eight grammatical cases and seven locative cases. There is no congruency between
adjectives In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the mai ...
and
nouns A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
in neutral Udmurt
noun phrases In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occ ...
; in other words, there is no adjective declension as in the inessive noun phrase ("in a big village"; cf.
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
inessive phrase ', in which ' "large" is inflected according to the head noun). *Of all the locative cases, personal pronouns can only inflect in the allative (also called approximative).


Plural

There are two types of nominal plurals in Udmurt. One is the plural for nouns ''-/-'' and the other is the plural for adjectives ''-/-''.


Nominal plural

The noun is always in plural. In attributive plural phrases, the adjective is not required to be in the plural: The plural marker always comes before other endings (i.e. cases and possessive suffixes) in the morphological structure of plural nominal.


Predicative plural

As in Hungarian and
Mordvinic languages The Mordvinic languages, also known as the Mordvin, Mordovian or Mordvinian languages (russian: мордовские языки, ''mordovskiye yazyki''), are a subgroup of the Uralic languages, comprising the closely related Erzya language and Mok ...
, if the subject is plural, the adjective is always plural when it functions as the sentence's predicative: Udmurt
pronoun In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s are inflected much in the same way that their referent nouns are. However, personal pronouns are only inflected in the grammatical cases and cannot be inflected in the locative cases.


Pronouns


Personal pronouns

Udmurt
personal pronoun Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s are used to refer to human beings only. However, the third person singular can be referred to as ''it''. The nominative case of personal pronouns are listed in the following table:


Interrogative pronouns

Udmurt interrogative pronouns inflect in all cases. However, the inanimate interrogative pronouns 'what' in the locative cases have the base form ''-''. The nominative case of interrogative pronouns are listed in the following table:


Verbs

Udmurt
verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
s are divided into two
conjugation Conjugation or conjugate may refer to: Linguistics * Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form * Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language Mathematics * Complex conjugation, the chang ...
groups, both having the
infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...
marker '. There are three verbal moods in Udmurt:
indicative A realis mood ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences. Mos ...
, conditional and imperative. There is also an
optative The optative mood ( or ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative mo ...
mood used in certain
dialects The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...
. The indicative mood has four tenses: present, future, and two past tenses. In addition there are four past tense structures which include
auxiliary verbs An auxiliary verb (abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a p ...
. Verbs are negated by use of an auxiliary
negative verb Dryer defined three different types of negative markers in language. Beside negative particles and negative affixes, negative verbs play a role in various languages. The negative verb is used to implement a clausal negation. The negative predic ...
that conjugates with personal endings. The basic verbal personal markers in Udmurt are (with some exceptions): *The present tense in Udmurt in all but the third person, is marked with '.


Syntax

Udmurt is an SOV language.


Lexicon

Depending on the style, about 10 to 30 percent of the Udmurt lexicon consists of
loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...
s. Many loanwords are from the
Tatar language Tatar ( or ) is a Turkic languages, Turkic language spoken by Volga Tatars, Tatars mainly located in modern Tatarstan (European Russia), as well as Siberia. It should not be confused with Crimean Tatar language, Crimean Tatar or Siberian Tat ...
, which has also strongly influenced Udmurt phonology and syntax. The Udmurt language, along with the Tatar language, influenced the language of the Udmurt Jews, in the dialects of which the words of Finno-Ugric and Turkic origin there were recorded.Altyntsev A.V., "The Concept of Love in Ashkenazim of Udmurtia and Tatarstan", Nauka Udmurtii. 2013. № 4 (66), pp. 131–132. (Алтынцев А.В.
"Чувство любви в понимании евреев-ашкенази Удмуртии и Татарстана".
Наука Удмуртии. 2013. №4. С. 131–132: Комментарии.)
Goldberg-Altyntsev A.V.
"A short ethnographic overview of the Ashkenazic Jews' group in Alnashsky District of Udmurt Republic".
Die Sammlung der wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten der jungen jüdischen Wissenschaftler. Herausgegeben von Artur Katz, Yumi Matsuda und Alexander Grinberg. München, Dachau, 2015. S. 51.
Гольдберг-Алтынцев А.В., "Краткий этнографический обзор группы ашкеназских евреев в Алнашском районе Удмуртской Республики / пер. с англ. яз. А.Й. Каца."
Jewish studies in the Udmurt Republic: Online. Part 1. Edited by A. Greenberg. February 27, 2015 published. P. 3.
Goldberg-Altyntsev A.V., "Some characteristics of the Jews in Alnashsky District of Udmurt Republic." The youth. The creativity. The science. Edited by V. Cox, A. Katz and A. Greenberg. Trenton, 2014, p. 28. (גאלדבערג-אלטינצעוו א.ו.
". איניגע באזונדערהייטן פון די יידן אין אלנאשסקער רייאן פון ודמורטישע רעפובליק"
The youth. The creativity. The science. = Die Jugend. Die Kreativität. Die Wissenschaft. = נוער. יצירתיות. מדע Edited by V. Cox, A. Katz and A. Greenberg. Trenton, 2014. P. 28.)


Media in Udmurt

Eurovision runners-up
Buranovskiye Babushki Buranovskiye Babushki (russian: Бурановские бабушки, ; udm, Брангуртысь песянайёс, Brangurtyś pesänajos; both meaning "Buranovo Grannies") is an Udmurt-Russian ethno-pop band comprising eight elderly wo ...
, a pop group composed of Udmurt grandmothers, sing mostly in Udmurt. The romantic comedy film
Berry-Strawberry ''Berry-Strawberry'' ( udm, Узы-Боры, translit. Uzy-Bory; russian: Ягода-Клубника, translit. ''Yagoda-Klubnika'') is a 2011 comedy film in the Udmurt language Udmurt is a Permic language spoken by the Udmurt people who are nat ...
, a joint Polish-Udmurt production, is in the Udmurt language. In 2013 the film company " Inwis kinopottonni" produced a film in the Udmurt language called Puzkar ("nest"). The
Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
was first completely translated into Udmurt in 2013.


Bibliography

* * *


References


External links

*
Udmurtology: Udmurt Language, History and CultureLiteratureThe First Udmurt ForumUdmurt State University (has Udmurt Language Program for English speakers)
* ''
Vladimir Napolskikh Vladimir Vladimirovich Napolskikh (russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Напо́льских, born 1 April 1963, Izhevsk, USSR) is a Russian ethnographer, ethnologist, ethnohistorian, Finno-Ugrist and linguist. Doctor of Histo ...
.'
Review of Eberhard Winkler, Udmurt, München 2001 (Languages of the World. Materials 212)

Udmurt – Finnish/Komi Zyrian dictionary
(robust finite-state, open-source)
Learning Udmurt wordsBGN/PCGN romanization tool for Udmurt
{{DEFAULTSORT:Udmurt Language Permic languages Languages of Russia Agglutinative languages