Udmurt language

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Udmurt is a language spoken by the Udmurt people in Udmurtia, a region of Russia. It belongs to the Uralic language family, in the Permic branch with Komi and Permyak, so it is distantly related to Finnish and Hungarian. It is written with Cyrillic letters plus five extra characters not found in Russian.

In Udmurtia, Udmurt is official alongside Russian. About 270,000 people spoke it in 2020. There are three main dialect groups—Northern, Central, and Besermyan—that form a continuum and differ mainly in vocabulary influenced by neighboring languages.

Udmurt is considered Definitely Endangered by UNESCO, meaning it is at risk of falling out of use. It is an agglutinative, subject–object–verb (SOV) language with many suffixes and 15 noun cases. It has no gender in nouns or personal pronouns, and it does not use vowel harmony. Some sounds from Russian and Tatars appear in loanwords. There are two main verb conjugation groups; verbs show mood and tense, with three main moods (indicative, conditional, imperative) and an optional mood in some dialects. Negation is expressed with a separate negative verb.

Pronouns behave similarly to nouns in inflection and are mainly used for humans. Udmurt was historically known outside the language as “Votyak.” The language has borrowed many words from Tatar and Russian.

Culturally, Udmurt has appeared in music and film. The pop group Buranovskiye Babushki sings in Udmurt, and films such as Berry-Strawberry and Puzkar are in the language. A full Bible translation into Udmurt was completed in 2013.