Erzya Alphabet & Letters

The Erzya language, one of the two Mordvinic languages of the Uralic family, is written in Cyrillic with 33 letters, in this order: А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я. Unlike its Volga neighbours Mari (Ӱ, Ӧ, Ҥ) and Komi (Ӧ, І), Erzya needs no letters beyond these; it shares the whole set with Russian, so any Russian keyboard writes Erzya completely.

Erzya has a simple set of five vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and no open ä: where Moksha, its sister language, writes мокшень кяль with я, Erzya says эрзянь кель with е. Ы is not a separate vowel in Erzya; it is the sound of и after a hard consonant, written ы where Russian spelling would expect it.

Some letters belong mainly to loanwords: Ф, Х, Щ and Ъ appear chiefly in words taken from Russian. Ц and Ё, on the other hand, are at home in native words such as цёра, boy or son.

Soft consonants, э and vowel harmony

Erzya pairs many consonants as hard and soft, and softness changes the meaning, so the soft sign ь is one of its busiest letters. It marks the soft consonant at the end of кель (tongue, language) and the genitive ending of эрзянь (of the Erzya). Before е, и, ё, ю and я, paired consonants are soft without an extra mark, as in Russian; after pairless consonants, е and и do not mark softness.

The letter э is common in Erzya. Erzya writes it after a hard consonant inside a word to show that the consonant stays hard before the vowel e: велесэ, in the village, has a hard с, where е would make it soft. Russian also uses э inside words, as in поэт, so the letter is not unique to Mordvin texts.

Erzya also has vowel harmony: many suffixes come in a back form with о and a front form with е or э, chosen by the vowels and consonants of the word. Кудосо, in the house, and велесэ, in the village, carry the same ending in its two shapes.

Erzya and Moksha: the two Mordvin languages

Outside Mordovia the two are often called simply "Mordvin" or "Mordovian", and older books describe one Mordvin language with two dialects. Today Erzya and Moksha are separate literary languages, each with its own standard, schoolbooks, newspapers and literature, and their speakers do not easily follow each other. Both use the same 33-letter Cyrillic alphabet, so the Moksha collection looks the same letter for letter while the words differ: Erzya вейке, кавто, колмо against Moksha фкя, кафта, колма for one, two, three.

The Mordvinic languages belong to the Uralic family. Their nearest relatives on fsymbols are Mari, Udmurt and Komi in the Volga and Ural region; Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are distant cousins. The Erzya land is called Эрзянь Мастор, from мастор, land or earth, a phrase also used as the name of an Erzya newspaper.

How to type Erzya letters on a keyboard

Add the Russian keyboard layout, which Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone all include: every Erzya letter has a key. On the standard Windows Russian layout Ё ё sits on the key left of 1, and Э э is on the key right of Ж (the Latin apostrophe key). If you do not know the Russian key positions, a phonetic Russian layout puts the letters near their Latin look-alikes, or you can copy letters from the grid on this page.

The quotation marks are Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 » on a Windows number pad, and Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ on a US Mac keyboard; in HTML write « and ». The ruble sign ₽ is U+20BD: in Word type 20BD and press Alt+X.

Watch the look-alikes. Cyrillic а, е, о, р, с, у, х look exactly like Latin a, e, o, p, c, y, x but are different characters, so a word typed half in Latin letters will not be found by search or a spell checker. Type the whole word on the Russian layout rather than mixing the two.

Where the Erzya language is spoken

Erzya has about 440,000 speakers by CLDR estimates, all counted in Russia 🇷🇺. Its centre is the Republic of Mordovia on the middle Volga, where Erzya, Moksha and Russian are the state languages and Erzya is spoken mainly in the north and east of the republic; the capital is Saransk. Many Erzya villages lie outside Mordovia, in the neighbouring Nizhny Novgorod, Penza, Ulyanovsk and Samara regions and further east towards the Urals.

Erzya speakers are almost all bilingual in Russian. Erzya text uses «…» for quotations, „…“ inside them and a long dash — for dialogue. Prices are written in rubles, with ₽ after the number. The Russian and Russia collections share these marks and the ruble sign.

Is there an Erzya or Mordovia flag emoji?

No. Flag emoji are built from two regional indicator letters standing for an ISO country code, so 🇷🇺 is R + U for Russia. Unicode also allows tag sequences for regions inside a country, but only England, Scotland and Wales are on the recommended list, so phones draw no flag for Mordovia and none for the Erzya people.

The flag of the Republic of Mordovia has three horizontal stripes, dark red, white and dark blue, with a red eight-pointed sun rosette in the middle of the white; people stand in for it with 🟥⬜🟦. The Erzya also have a flag of their own as a people, separate from the republic's, and online it is simply written out or shared as a picture next to 🇷🇺.