The Mari language (Mari: марий йылме, marii jylme, Russian: марийский язык), spoken by nearly 500,000 people, belongs to the Uralic language family. It is spoken primarily in the Mari Republic (Mari: Марий Эл, Marii El, i.e., 'Mari land') of the Russian Federation as well as in the area along the Vyatka river basin and eastwards to the Urals. Mari speakers, known as the Mari are found also in the Tatarstan, Udmurtia, and Perm regions.
Mari today has a unified standard form with two variants (Hill and Meadow AKA Western and Eastern, with the Eastern variant prevailing in everyday usage), using a modified version of Cyrillic script, and is the titular and official language of its republic, alongside Russian. The use of two "variants", as opposed to two "languages", has been hotly debated: Maris recognize the unity of the ethnic group, and the two forms are very close, but distinct enough to cause some problems with communication.
Read more about Mari Language: Ethnonym and Glottonym, Sociolinguistic Situation, Dialects, Orthography, Grammar, Some Common Words and Phrases, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)