Today, the Moksha language is one of the official languages of the Republic of Mordovia along with Erzya. 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
Mokshan language (Moksha) is a language belonging 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 minor languages common in the Urals. The closest to him is now the dead Meshchersky. Today, only about two thousand people speak the Moksha language, that is, it can be attributed to disappearing.
A bit of history
In the first centuries of our era on the territory of modern Mordovia, a common Mordovian language or a combination of related Mordovian dialects was common. Around the V-VI century, the divergence of the latter became so strong that they turned into two related, but independent languages - Moksha and Erzya.
Language features
The language has 7 vowel phonemes and 33 consonants, which are 21 letters in the letter. The emphasis, as a rule, falls on the first syllable, and in paired words like “atyat-babat” (“old man with old woman”) falls on each part.
Mokshan language refers to the so-called agglutinative languages. This is the type in which each grammatical meaning is expressed by a separate morpheme (in contrast to Russian, where the ending of a noun, for example, expresses a whole complex of grammatical meanings).
There is a huge number of cases (along with obsolete and rarely used, there are about 20), expressing various shades of semantic meanings. Nouns vary in three declensions: basic, demonstrative, and possessive. It is interesting that in the named language there is no gender category - it is not grammatically expressed.
The grammatical system of the Moksha verb is also interesting. There are four of its tenses: two past, present-future and a complex future. In this system, the modality of the verb is not presented, the category expressing reality-unreality of action, longevity.
For those interested, there are several lexicographic publications: the etymological Moksha dictionary edited by V. Vershinin. (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, the Cyrillic alphabet is used to display the sounds on the letter, that is, the modern Moksha alphabet is no different from Russian.
Moksha language today
Currently, a large number of periodicals, as well as a small amount of fiction and scientific literature, are published in this language in Mordovia. Schools have Moksha language lessons, they study it in universities, it sounds on national Mordovian radio and television. However, it cannot be said that language fully functions in all spheres of society in the entire region. There are almost no native speakers among the urban population - Russian has supplanted it. Moksha is used mainly in rural areas, gradually acquiring the status of a dialect. Although a few decades ago, Moksha speech was not uncommon.
Today, the processes of globalization, unification and absorption of small nations by more numerous ones are actively going on in the world. In this regard, many interesting cultures, unfortunately, are being wiped off the face of the earth and gaining the status of the dead; small languages, such as Moksha, Erzya and others, are dying out.