Udmurt

Abstract

Abstract Udmurt is a minority language spoken in European Russia in the region between the rivers Kama and Volga. It has an official status in the Udmurt Republic, but especially in the last twenty years, its intergenerational transmission has become clearly endangered. The standard language has a puristic character, whereas spoken Udmurt is characterized by dialectal variation and – since almost all speakers are bilingual in Russian – copious borrowings from Russian, code-switching, and code-mixing. Udmurt shares many features with its closest relative Komi; for instance, it has a similarly rich case system, possession marking, and similar TAM categories. However, Udmurt has specific features that do not exist in the Komi language; some of them due to the influence of Turkic languages. In particular, the second past tense has a morphological negative form that doesn’t exist in Komi. The vocabulary of the modern language contains a great number of loans from Tatar as well.