The Erzya language (эрзянь кель,, ), also Erzian or historically Arisa, is spoken by approximately 300,000 people in the northern, eastern and north-western parts of the Republic of Mordovia and adjacent regions of Nizhny Novgorod, Chuvashia, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in Russia. A diaspora can also be found in Armenia and Estonia, as well as in Kazakhstan and other states of Central Asia. Erzya is currently written using Cyrillic with no modifications to the variant used by the Russian language. In Mordovia, Erzya is co-official with Moksha and Russian. The language belongs to the Mordvinic branch of the Uralic languages. Erzya is a language that is closely related to Moksha but has distinct phonetics, morphology and vocabulary.

Phonology

Consonants

The following table lists the consonant phonemes of Erzya together with their Cyrillic equivalents. Palatalization is widespread in Erzya, but is contrastive only for the alveolar consonants. The labial and velar consonants have palatalized allophones before the front vowels,. The pairs –, – and – also often alternate depending on a following or preceding back vs. front vowel. E.g. the 1st person singular possessive suffix has allomorphs such as and. The palatalized consonants can natively occur also in a back vowel environment, e.g. the genitive suffix, providing minimal pairs such as кудон 'my house' – кудонь '(a) house's'. Non-palatalized, , in a front vowel environment are limited to recent Russian loans such as кит 'whale'. Note on romanized transcription: in Uralic studies, the members of the palatalized series are usually spelled as ⟨ń⟩, ⟨ť⟩, ⟨ď⟩, ⟨ć⟩, ⟨ś⟩, ⟨ź⟩, ⟨ŕ⟩, ⟨ľ⟩, while the postalveolar sounds are spelled ⟨č⟩, ⟨š⟩, ⟨ž⟩ (see Uralic Phonetic Alphabet). and are loan phonemes from Russian. There is a phonemic contrast between and, despite that they share the standard spelling ⟨н⟩. Minimal pairs include:

Vowels

Erzya has a simple five-vowel system. The front vowels and have centralized variants and immediately following a plain alveolar consonant, e.g. "they", "blue".

Vowel harmony

As in many other Uralic languages, Erzya has vowel harmony. Most roots contain either front vowels or back vowels. In addition, all suffixes with mid vowels have two forms: the form to be used is determined by the final syllable of the stem. The low vowel, found in the comparative case -шка "the size of" and the prolative -ка/-га/-ва "spatial multipoint used with verbs of motion as well as position" is a back vowel and not subject to vowel harmony. The rules of vowel harmony are as follows: However, if the back vowel is followed by a palatalized consonant or palatal glide, vowel harmony is violated and the "front" form of the suffix is used: кальсэ "with willow", ойсэ "with butter". Likewise, if a front-vowel stem is followed by a low back vowel suffix, subsequent syllables will contain back harmony: велеванзо "throughout its villages" Thus the seeming violations of vowel harmony attested in stems, e.g. узере "axe", суре "thread (string)", are actually due to the palatalized consonants and. One exception to front-vowel harmony is observed in palatalized non-final, e.g. асфальтсо "with asphalt".

Morphology

Like all other Uralic languages, Erzya is an agglutinative language which expresses grammatical relations by means of suffixes.

Nouns

Nouns are inflected for case, number, definiteness and possessor. Erzya distinguishes twelve cases (here illustrated with the noun мода "ground, earth"). Number is systematically distinguished only with definite nouns; for indefinite nouns and nouns with a possessive suffix, only the nominative case has a distinct plural. Plural possessors follow the pattern of second person singular possessors.

Verbs

Erzya verbs are inflected for tense and mood, and are further conjugated for person of subject and object. Traditionally, three stem types are distinguished: a-stems, o-stems and e-stems. A-stems always retain the stem vowel a in the non-third-person present-tense forms, and in the third-person first past-tense forms (e.g. "kissed"). With many o-stems and e-stems, the stem vowel is dropped in these forms (e.g. o-stem "watched", e-stem "swallowed"), but there also o- and e-stem verbs which retain the vowel ( "slept", "cooked"). Rueter (2010) therefore divides verb stems into vowel-retaining stems and vowel-dropping stems. In indicative mood, three tenses are distinguished: present/future, first past, second (=habitual) past. The third-person singular form in the present tense is also used as present participle. The second past tense is formed by adding the past-tense copula to the present participle. The other mood categories are:

Writing

Cyrillic alphabet

The modern Erzya alphabet is the same as for Russian: The letters ф, х, щ and ъ are only used in loanwords from Russian. The pre-1929 version of the Erzya alphabet included the additional letter Ҥ|Cyrillic ligature En Ge (Ҥ ҥ) in some publications, (cf. Evsevyev 1928). In combination with the alveolar consonants т, д, ц, с, з, н, л, and р, vowel letters are employed to distinguish between plain and palatalized articulations in a similar way as in Russian: а, э, ы, о, у follow plain alveolars, while я, е, и, ё, ю follow palatalized alveolars, e.g. та /ta/, тэ /te/, ты /ti/, то /to/, ту /tu/ vs. тя /tʲa/, те /tʲe/, ти /tʲi/, тё /tʲo/, тю /tʲu/. If no vowel follows, palatalization is indicated by ь, e.g. ть /tʲ/. Following non-alveolar consonants, only а, е, и, о, у occur, e.g. па /pa/, пе /pe/, пи /pi/, по /po/, пу /pu/.

Latin alphabet

A Latin alphabet was officially approved by the government of Nizhne-Volzhskiy Kray in 1932, but it was never used: One of the modern Latin alphabet proposals:

Sample Text