Mari Alphabet & Letters

Mari, a Uralic language of the middle Volga, has two main written standards, and both use Cyrillic. Meadow Mari (олык марий йылме), spoken by most Mari, has 36 letters: Cyrillic А–Я together with its own Ҥ ҥ, Ӧ ӧ and Ӱ ӱ. Hill Mari (кырык мары йӹлмӹ), spoken west of the Volga, has 37: Cyrillic А–Я together with its own Ӓ ӓ, Ӧ ӧ, Ӱ ӱ and Ӹ ӹ, but no Ҥ. The grid above holds the letters of both, so whichever Mari you write, everything you need is here.

The extra letters sit right after the letter they are built on, so Mari alphabetical order runs А (Ӓ) Б В … Н Ҥ О Ӧ П … У Ӱ Ф … Ы (Ӹ) Ь Э Ю Я. Dictionaries sort words that way: in a Meadow Mari dictionary, words beginning with Ӧ come after all the words beginning with О.

Letters such as Ф, Х, Ц, Щ and Ъ, and in Meadow Mari also Ё, turn up mostly in words borrowed from Russian. The native vocabulary leans on the vowels, and the special vowel letters appear in many everyday words.

What the Mari special letters sound like

Ӧ ӧ is a rounded front vowel, like German ö or Finnish ö, and Ӱ ӱ is the rounded front vowel of German ü or Finnish y. They are full letters, not decorated О and У: ӱдыр means girl, вӱд water, шӱм heart, and writing them with plain у gives a different, wrong word. Meadow Mari has vowel harmony, so many endings come in three shapes, such as the locative -ште, -што and -штӧ, picked to match the vowels of the word.

Ҥ ҥ, used in Meadow Mari, is the sound written ng in English 'sing', as in шоҥго (old) and кеҥеж (summer). Its shape is a Н fused with a small Г, and in Unicode it is the 'Cyrillic capital ligature en ghe'. Hill Mari spells the same sound нг. Do not swap it for the similar-looking Ң (en with descender), which is a different letter: the standard Meadow Mari letter is Ҥ.

Hill Mari has two vowels of its own. Ӓ ӓ is an open front vowel like the a in English 'cat', as in ӓвӓ (mother; Meadow Mari ава). Ӹ ӹ, a Ы with two dots, is a back vowel that Meadow Mari does not have; it shows up in the language's own name, мары йӹлмӹ. Ӹ is used by hardly any other written language.

How to type Mari letters on a keyboard

Start from a Russian keyboard layout, which Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone all include: it covers every Mari letter except the extra five. Some systems and keyboard apps also offer a Mari layout; if yours does, the extra letters are on keys of their own. Otherwise copy them from this page or use their Unicode codes.

In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 04E6 Ӧ, 04E7 ӧ, 04F0 Ӱ, 04F1 ӱ, 04A4 Ҥ, 04A5 ҥ, 04D2 Ӓ, 04D3 ӓ, 04F8 Ӹ, 04F9 ӹ. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input layout, hold Option and type the same four digits. In HTML write ӧ for ӧ, ӱ for ӱ, ҥ for ҥ, ӓ for ӓ and ӹ for ӹ. On a phone, a text replacement shortcut that turns a short code into ӧ or ӱ saves a lot of long-pressing.

Watch the look-alikes. Latin Ö and Ü (from a German or Finnish layout) look exactly like Cyrillic Ӧ and Ӱ, but they are different characters, so a word typed with them will not be found by search, sorted correctly or accepted by a spell checker. The quotation marks are Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 » on a Windows number pad, and Option+\ and Option+Shift+\ on a US Mac keyboard.

Where Mari is spoken

Mari has an estimated 520,000 speakers, according to CLDR estimates, all of them counted in Russia 🇷🇺. Its home is the Mari El Republic (Марий Эл, 'Mari land') on the middle Volga, where Meadow Mari, Hill Mari and Russian are the official languages; the capital is Yoshkar-Ola, Йошкар-Ола, Mari for 'red city'. Hill Mari is centred on the right bank of the Volga around Kozmodemyansk, and large Eastern Mari communities, writing the Meadow standard, live in Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Udmurtia and the Kirov and Sverdlovsk regions. Prices are written in rubles, with ₽.

Mari forms its own branch of the Uralic family. Its neighbours Udmurt, Komi, Erzya and Moksha are Uralic too, and further away so are Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, whose ö and ü sounds match Mari ӧ and ӱ. Centuries beside Chuvash and Tatar, both Turkic, gave Mari many loanwords, and most Mari speakers also read and write Russian, so the Russian, Chuvash and Tatar collections are useful neighbours.

Is there a Mari or Mari El flag emoji?

No. Flag emoji are made from two regional indicator letters standing for an ISO country code, so 🇷🇺 is R + U for Russia. Unicode also has tag sequences for regions inside a country, but only England, Scotland and Wales are on the recommended list, so phones draw no flag for Mari El. People writing about Mari El use 🇷🇺 or simply the words Марий Эл.

One emoji does belong to Mari culture: the tree 🌳. The Mari traditional religion, still practised, holds its prayers in sacred groves, кӱсото in Meadow Mari, and the grove is one of the best-known images of Mari life.