Today the Moksha language is one of the state 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 Penza, Ryazan, Orenburg, Saratov, Tambov and some other regions.
Position among other languages of the world
Moksha 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 spoken in the Urals. The closest to him is the now dead Meshchersky. To date, only about two thousand people speak the Moksha language, that is, it can be classified as endangered.
A bit of history
In the first centuries of our era, a single Mordovian language or a set of related Mordovian dialects was spread on the territory of modern Mordovia. Approximately in the 5th-6th 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 represented by 21 letters in writing. The stress, as a rule, falls on the first syllable, and in paired words like "atyat-babat" ("old man with an old woman") falls on each of the parts.
Moksha language belongs to the so-called agglutinative languages. This is a type in which each grammatical meaning is expressed by a separate morpheme (unlike Russian, where the ending of a noun, for example, expresses a whole complex of grammatical meanings).
Here there are a huge number of cases (together with obsolete and rarely used ones, there are about 20 of them), expressing various shades of semantic meanings. Nouns are inflected 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 curious. There are four of its tenses: two past, present-future and complex future. This system does not represent the modality of the verb, the category expressing the reality-unreality of the action, the obligation.
For those interested, there are several lexicographic publications: the etymological Mokshan dictionary edited by Vershinin V. I. (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 sounds in writing, that is, the modern Moksha alphabet does notdifferent from Russian.
Moksha 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. There are lessons in the Moksha language in schools, it is also studied in universities, it is heard on the national Mordovian radio and television. However, it cannot be said that the language fully functions in all spheres of society throughout the region. There are almost no native speakers left among the urban population - it was replaced by Russian. 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 world is actively undergoing the processes of globalization, unification and absorption of small peoples by more numerous ones. In this regard, many interesting cultures, unfortunately, are being wiped off the face of the earth and acquiring the status of dead, small languages are dying out, such as Moksha, Erzya and others.
