Udmurt language

Udmurt
Удмурт кыл
Udmurt kyl
Native toRussia
RegionUdmurtia
EthnicityUdmurts
Native speakers
270,000 (2020 census)[1]
Official status
Official language in
 Russia
Language codes
ISO 639-2udm
ISO 639-3udm
Glottologudmu1245
ELPUdmurt
Distribution of Udmurt dialects at the beginning of 21st century[2][3]
Udmurt is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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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.

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. The Udmurt language shares similar agglutinative structures with its closest relative, the Komi language.[4] 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.[5] 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),[6] a decline of roughly 41% in 21 years.

  1. ^ "Итоги Всероссийской переписи населения 2020 года. Таблица 6. Население по родному языку" [Results of the All-Russian population census 2020. Table 6. population according to native language.]. rosstat.gov.ru. Archived from the original on 2020-01-24. Retrieved 2023-01-03.
  2. ^ Rantanen, Timo; Tolvanen, Harri; Roose, Meeli; Ylikoski, Jussi; Vesakoski, Outi (2022-06-08). "Best practices for spatial language data harmonization, sharing and map creation—A case study of Uralic". PLOS ONE. 17 (6): e0269648. Bibcode:2022PLoSO..1769648R. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0269648. PMC 9176854. PMID 35675367.
  3. ^ Rantanen, Timo, Vesakoski, Outi, Ylikoski, Jussi, & Tolvanen, Harri. (2021). Geographical database of the Uralic languages (v1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4784188
  4. ^ Edygarova, Svetlana (2022). "The Udmurt language between 1920 and 1950". Finnisch-ugrische Mitteilungen. 46: 91–139. ISBN 9783967692778.
  5. ^ "Udmurt". Endangered Languages Project. Retrieved 29 January 2022.
  6. ^ Ethnologue code=UDM Archived October 9, 2008, at the Wayback Machine