What is Mokshan?

Today the Moksha language is one of the state languages of the Republic of Mordovia along with the Erzyan language. In addition to the Republic of Mordovia, native speakers can be found in many other neighboring regions of modern Russia, close to the Urals: in the Penza, Ryazan, Orenburg, Saratov, Tambov and some other areas.

Position among other languages of the world

The Moksha language (moksha) is a language related to the Mordovian subgroup, the Finno-Volga group, the Finno-Ugric branch, the Uralic language group. That is, the language can be considered a "distant relative" of Finnish, Estonian, Udmurt and other small languages common in the Urals. The closest to him is now the dead Meshchersky. To date, the Mokshan language has only about two thousand people, that is, it can be attributed to the disappearing.

A bit of history

In the first centuries of our era, in the territory of present-day Mordovia, a single Mordovian language or a set of related Mordvinian dialects was distributed. Approximately in the V-VI century the discrepancy of the latter became so strong that they turned into two related but independent languages - Moksha and Erzya.

Language features

There are 7 vowel phonemes and 33 consonants in the language, which are represented by 21 letters on the letter. The stress, as a rule, falls on the first syllable, and in pairs of words like "atyat-babat" ("old man with an old woman") falls on each of the parts.

The Moksha language refers to the so-called agglutinative languages. This is a type in which each grammatical meaning is expressed by a separate morpheme (unlike in Russian, where the ending of a noun, for example, expresses a whole complex of grammatical meanings).

Here there is a huge number of cases (together with obsolete and rarely used, there are about 20) expressing different shades of semantic meanings. Nouns change in three declensions: the basic, the index and the possessive. It is interesting that in this language there is no category of the genus - it is not grammatically expressed.

The grammatical system of the Moksha verb is also curious. There are four of his time: the past two, the present-future and the complex future. In this system, the modality of the verb is not represented, the category expressing reality-the unreality of action, the obligation.

For those interested, there are several lexicographic publications: the etymological Moksha dictionary edited by Vershinin VI. (The output of the dictionary, by the way, was due to the rapid "extinction" of the language), Russian-Moksha and Moksha-Russian dictionaries.

By the way, Cyrillic alphabet is used to display sounds on the letter, that is, the modern Moksha alphabet is no different from Russian.

Moksha language today

Currently in this language in Mordovia a large number of periodicals are published, as well as a small amount of fiction and scientific literature. The schools have lessons in the Moksha language, it is also studied in high schools, it sounds on the national Mordovian radio and television. However, we can not say that the language fully functions in all spheres of society in the whole region. Among the urban population, there were almost no native speakers - it was replaced by Russian. Moksha is used mainly in rural areas, gradually acquiring the status of a dialect. Although a few dozen years ago the Moksha speech was not uncommon.

Today, the processes of globalization, unification and absorption of numerically smaller peoples in the world are more numerous. In this regard, many interesting cultures, unfortunately, are erased from the face of the earth and acquire the status of the dead, small languages such as Mokshan, Erzya and others are dying out.