Moksha Alphabet & Letters

Moksha, one of the two Mordvinic languages of the Uralic family, is written with 33 Cyrillic letters: 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 northern neighbours Komi (Ӧ, І) and Mari (Ӱ, Ӧ, Ҥ), Moksha uses no letters beyond these 33, a set it shares with Russian, so any Russian keyboard writes it completely.

Moksha gives these letters values of its own. Its sound system has an open front vowel ä, the vowel of English cat, and Moksha spelling uses я for it mainly in stressed first syllables and after palatalized consonants in later syllables: мокшень кяль is the Moksha language, where Erzya, its sister language, says эрзянь кель. Soft consonants are everywhere, so the soft sign ь is a very common letter, as in кяль and мокшень.

Letters such as Ф, Х, Ц and Щ appear mostly in words taken from Russian, although Ф also starts the native word фкя, one. Moksha also has a short neutral vowel, a schwa, and voiceless l and r sounds, none of which have letters of their own in the alphabet.

Moksha and Erzya: the two Mordvin languages

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

If you are looking for the "Mordvin alphabet", this page and the Erzya one are both the answer. The Mordvinic languages belong to the Uralic family, and their nearest relatives on fsymbols are Mari, Udmurt and Komi in the Volga and Ural region; Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are more distant cousins.

How to type Moksha letters on a keyboard

Add the Russian keyboard layout, which Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone all include: it has every Moksha letter on a key. On a standard Windows Russian layout Ё ё sits on the key left of 1. If you do not know the Russian key positions, a phonetic Russian layout puts the letters near their Latin look-alikes (я on Q, ф on F), or you can simply 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. Switch the whole word to the Russian layout rather than mixing the two.

Where the Moksha language is spoken

Russia's 2020 census counted 23,178 people who reported Moksha-Mordvin as their native language 🇷🇺. Its home is the Republic of Mordovia, on the middle Volga south-east of Moscow, where Moksha, Erzya and Russian are the state languages; Moksha is spoken mainly in the west and south of the republic and in neighbouring regions such as Penza Oblast. The language shares its name with the Moksha river, which runs through this land to the Oka. The capital of Mordovia is Saransk.

Nearly every Moksha speaker also reads and writes Russian, and Moksha is usually typeset with Russian conventions: «…» for quotations, „…“ inside them and a long dash — for dialogue (Unicode CLDR's Moksha locale lists “…” and ‘…’, which you may also see). Prices are written in rubles, with ₽ after the number, as in Russian. The Russian and Russia collections are the natural next stop.

Is there a Mordovia flag emoji?

No. Country and territory flag emoji use two regional indicator letters for a Unicode region 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.

The real flag 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 squares 🟥⬜🟦, or write Мордовия next to 🇷🇺.