Mari people
ethnic group
The Mari ( MAR-ee), also formerly known as the Cheremis or Cheremisses, are a Finno-Ugric people in Eastern Europe, who have traditionally lived along the Volga and Kama rivers in Russia. They live mostly in the Mari El republic, with significant minorities in Bashkortostan, Perm Krai, Tatarstan and Udmurtia. Mari make up 40.1% of the population of Mari El.
Name
The ethnic name mari derives from the Proto-Indo-Iranian root *márya-, meaning 'human', literally 'mortal', which indicates early contacts between Finno-Ugric and Indo-Iranian languages.
Subgroups
There are two main ethnographic subgroups of Mari people: Meadow Mari, who live on the right bank of the Volga river, and Hill (or Mountain) Mari, who live on the left bank. The ethnogenesis of these two subgroups, and formation of distinct dialects, probably took place in the 14th century. Meadow Mari comprise the majority of Mari, and their language variety is more widespread than the Hill Mari language. The 1995 Law on the Languages of the Republic and the Mari El constitution designate the Hill and Meadow varieties to be, along with Russian, the state languages of the republic.
Since the 19th century a third subgroup has been identified, the Eastern Mari. The Eastern dialect has been considered a variant of the Meadow dialect.
The public source identifies “Mari people” as ethnic group. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mari, people and ethnic.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mari people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.