Udmurt language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Udmurt удмурт кыл udmurt kyl
Spoken in:	Russia, Kazakhstan
Region:	Eastern Europe
Total speakers:	550,000 (1989 census)
Language family:	Uralic  Finno-Ugric   Finno-Permic    Permic     Udmurt
Official status
Official language of:	Udmurtia
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	udm
ISO 639-3:	udm
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Udmurt (удмурт кыл, udmurt kyl) is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by the Udmurts, natives of the Russian constituent republic of Udmurtia, where it is co-official with the Russian language. It is closely related to the Komi language, together with which it forms the group of Permic languages. It is written in the Cyrillic script with five additional characters. Linguistically, it is most closely related to Komi and Komi-Permyak.

Contents 1 Alphabet 2 Grammar 2.1 Nouns 2.2 Verbs 3 Syntax 4 Lexicon 5 External links

[edit] Alphabet

The Udmurt alphabet is based on the Cyrillic alphabet:

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Д д	Е е	Ё ё
Ж ж	Ӝ ӝ	З з	Ӟ ӟ	И и	Ӥ ӥ	Й й
К к	Л л	М м	Н н	О о	Ö ö
П п	Р р	С с	Т т	У у	Ф ф	Х х
Ц ц	Ч ч	Ӵ ӵ	Ш ш	Щ щ	Ъ ъ	Ы ы
Ь ь	Э э	Ю ю	Я я

Five of these characters (Ӝ/ӝ, Ӟ/ӟ, Ӥ/ӥ, Ӵ/ӵ, Ӧ/ӧ) are unique to the Udmurt alphabet.

[edit] Grammar

Udmurt is an agglutinating language. It uses affixes to explain possession, to specify the mode, the time, and so on.

There is no grammatical gender. The language does not distinguish between long and short vowels, and does not have vowel harmony.

[edit] Nouns

Specific noun types have no distinguishable formats; some words even belong to three categories: čilkit means clean, cleanness and clearly as well. There are 15 cases in the language. In the singular first, second, and third person, the ordinary possessive declining suffixes, -e, -ed, -ez sometimes change to -i, -id, -iz, especially in non-loanwords, such as kii (ki + i, my hand), kiid (ki + id, your (sing.) hand) and ki'iz (ki + iz, her/his hand).

The possessive suffix in the singular third person also acts as a definite article: Udmurt kil-iz č´eber. (the Udmurt language is nice - literally the Udmurt's language is nice.) An affirmative plural adjective gets the -eś suffix: toljos kuźeś (the winters are cold).

[edit] Verbs

In Udmurt, there are three modes. In indicative, there are four tenses: present, future, præteritum (the speaker personally observed the past event) and perfectum (the speaker not observed personally the past event). The last two have distinguishable suffixes: -i-/-a- and -em/-m.

[edit] Syntax

The language has free word order.

The copular verb (vań, - to be) is omitted if the sentence is in the present tense: tunne kiče nunal? (What day is it today?) If the sentence expresses possession, the vań can be part of the predicate: ti palan ńulesjos vań-a? (At you (plur.), are there forests?)

[edit] Lexicon

Based on the style, about 10 to 30 percent of the Udmurt lexicon are loanwords. Many loanwords are from the Tatar language, as well as phonetics, the syntax and so on. Words related to technology, science and politics have been being borrowed from Russian.

[edit] External links

• Udmurt Language (in Russian)
• Literature
• Udmurtology: Udmurt Language, History and Culture (in Russian)
• The First Udmurt Forum (in Russian)
• Udmurt State University (has Udmurt Language Program for English speakers)

Finno-Ugric languages
Ugric	Hungarian | Khanty | Mansi
Permic	Komi | Komi-Permyak | Udmurt
Finno-Volgaic	Mari | Erzya | Moksha | Merya† | Meshcherian† | Muromian†
Sami	Akkala Sami† | Inari Sami | Kemi Sami† | Kildin Sami | Lule Sami | Northern Sami | Pite Sami | Skolt Sami | Southern Sami | Ter Sami | Ume Sami
Baltic-Finnic	Estonian | Finnish | Ingrian | Karelian | Kven | Livonian | Ludic | Meänkieli | South Estonian | Veps | Votic | Võro † denotes extinct