Udmurt Alphabet & Letters

Udmurt, the Uralic language of the Udmurt Republic in the Volga–Ural region of Russia, is written in Cyrillic. Its alphabet has 38 letters, five of them made by putting a diaeresis, two dots, on a plain letter: Ӝ ӝ after Ж, Ӟ ӟ after З, Ӥ ӥ after И, Ӧ ӧ after О and Ӵ ӵ after Ч. So Udmurt alphabetical order runs А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж Ӝ З Ӟ И Ӥ Й К Л М Н О Ӧ П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ӵ Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я.

The two dots are part of the letter, not an accent you may drop: Ӟ and З are different sounds, and a word written without the dots is misspelled or becomes another word. Letters such as Ф, Х, Ц and Щ turn up mostly in words borrowed from Russian, while the five dotted letters are everywhere in native Udmurt words, from the greeting Ӟечбур! (hello) to бадӟым (big).

What the Udmurt letters Ӝ Ӟ Ӥ Ӧ Ӵ do

Three of the five letters write consonants that come in pairs with a plain Cyrillic letter. Udmurt has a hard and a soft 'ch': plain Ч ч is the soft one, as in Russian, and Ӵ ӵ is the hard one, close to the ch of English 'church'. It has a hard and a soft 'j' as well: Ӝ ӝ is the hard one, close to the j of English 'jam', and Ӟ ӟ the soft one, a j said with the tongue against the palate, as in Ӟечбур!.

Ӧ ӧ is a vowel: a central vowel said with spread lips, roughly the vowel of English 'bird' without the r. It is not the rounded ö of German or Finnish, though it looks the same, and it appears in everyday words such as ӧвӧл (no, there isn't).

Ӥ ӥ spells the same vowel as И, but it tells you about the consonant in front of it. In Udmurt, И after д, з, л, н, с or т makes that consonant soft (palatalized), as in Russian; Ӥ keeps it hard. It is very common in verb forms such as яратӥсько (I love). Komi, Udmurt's closest relative, solves the same problem with the letter І instead.

How to type Udmurt letters on a keyboard

Start from a Russian keyboard layout, which Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone all include: it covers every Udmurt letter except the five with two dots. On Linux there is a ready Udmurt variant of the Russian layout (ru(udm) in XKB) that puts ӝ ӧ ӵ ӥ ӟ on the number keys 6 to 0, with Shift for the capitals; elsewhere copy the letters from this page or set up text-replacement shortcuts on your phone.

In Microsoft Word, type the code and press Alt+X: 04DC Ӝ, 04DD ӝ, 04DE Ӟ, 04DF ӟ, 04E4 Ӥ, 04E5 ӥ, 04E6 Ӧ, 04E7 ӧ, 04F4 Ӵ, 04F5 ӵ. On a Mac, add the Unicode Hex Input layout, hold Option and type the same four digits. In HTML write Ӝ to ӟ for Ӝ ӝ Ӟ ӟ, Ӥ to ӧ for Ӥ ӥ Ӧ ӧ, and Ӵ and ӵ for Ӵ ӵ.

Watch the look-alikes. Latin Ö ö looks exactly like Cyrillic Ӧ ӧ but is a different character, so a word typed with it will not be found by search 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 Udmurt is spoken

Russia's 2021 census counted 255,877 people who reported knowing Udmurt 🇷🇺. Its home is the Udmurt Republic, Udmurtia, between the Kama and Vyatka rivers west of the Urals, where Udmurt and Russian are the official languages. The capital is Izhevsk, Ижкар in Udmurt; there are also Udmurt villages in neighbouring Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Perm Krai and Kirov Oblast. Prices are written in rubles, with ₽.

Udmurt belongs to the Permic branch of the Uralic family together with Komi, its closest relative, so many words are recognisably shared: Udmurt кыл and Komi кыв both mean language, and удмурт кыл is the Udmurt language. Mari, Erzya, Moksha, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are more distant cousins, and Tatar and Chuvash are Turkic neighbours that have lent Udmurt many words. Almost all Udmurt speakers are bilingual in Russian, so the Russian, Komi, Mari and Tatar collections are useful neighbours.

Is there an Udmurtia 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 Udmurtia. Its real flag has three vertical stripes, black, white and red, with a red eight-pointed sun sign on the white stripe, so the squares ⬛⬜🟥 can stand in for its colours, or 🇷🇺 can be used with the words Удмурт Элькун (Udmurt Republic).

The one emoji with a real Udmurt story is the dumpling 🥟: the Russian word pelmeni is generally traced to the Permic word for the dish, Udmurt пельнянь, 'ear bread', from пель (ear) and нянь (bread), after the dumpling's shape.