World Language Map

Where is Erzya spoken?

Erzya (Эрзянь кель) is an Uralic language, spoken in Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia and 4 more. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Erzya is spoken

Erzya is spoken in 8 countries: Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia and 4 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Russia0.3%436,545
AzerbaijanNot givenNot given
BelarusNot givenNot given
EstoniaNot givenNot given
KazakhstanNot givenNot given
LatviaNot givenNot given
LithuaniaNot givenNot given
UkraineNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Erzya has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Erzya?

Wikidata gives about 97,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Erzya sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Erzya as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Uralic
  2. Mordvin
  3. Erzya

Related languages

Other languages in the Mordvin group:

More about Erzya

Codes: ISO 639-3 myv, Glottolog erzy1239. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Erzya

Where is Erzya spoken?

Erzya is spoken in Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia and 4 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.3% of the population of Russia, which is about 436,545 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Erzya?

Wikidata gives about 97,000 speakers (Ethnologue, 2010). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Erzya in?

Glottolog places Erzya in the Uralic family, in the branch Mordvin.

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