Ersjan language
| Erzya-Mordovian
( Эрзянь кель Ersjan 'kel' ) |
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|---|---|---|
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Spoken in |
Russia | |
| speaker | approx. 500,000 | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in | Mordovia | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
myv |
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| ISO 639-3 |
myv |
|
The Erzya-Mordovian ( ersjanisch э́рзянь ersjan ' ) is one of the two main dialects of the Mordovian language , which belongs to the Volga- Finnish group of the Finno-Ugric languages . Ersa-Mordovian is also written. This language is spoken in the northern parts of the Republic of Mordovia .
The exact number of speakers for Erzya Mordovian cannot be precisely quantified; for the entire Mordovian language it amounts to approx. 750,000, whereby the Ersjanische takes up the largest part with about 500,000 speakers. However, young people in the cities in particular have a poor or no command of their mother tongue. Since school lessons mostly only take place in Russian, the children whose mother tongue is Erzya or Moksha Mordovian have little chance of developing their mother tongue literarily. The number of speakers is falling continuously. In the long term, the two Mordovian languages could therefore be threatened with extinction.
As part of the joint program “Minorities in Russia: Developing Culture, Language, Media and Civil Society” of the Council of Europe , the European Commission and Russia, four project proposals were submitted in Mordovia with the aim of promoting the Eryan and Mochan languages.
Special features of Ersyan
While most Finno-Ugric languages have a variety of vowel phonemes , Ersyan only has a , e , i , o and u . Vowels are always spoken briefly. Likewise, Ersjan has no diphthongs whatsoever .
In contrast to Mokshan and most other Finno-Ugric languages, the emphasis is often on different syllables than the first. Ersjan has eleven cases and uses different suffixes for possessive formation than Mokschan.
