Hill Mari language
Mari language in the Uralic language family
Hill Mari, or Western Mari (кырык мары, kyryk mary), is a Uralic language closely related to Northwestern Mari and Meadow Mari, in which Hill Mari forms a Western Mari group with the former.
Hill Mari is spoken in the Gornomariysky, Yurinsky and Kilemarsky districts of Mari El, as well as in Voskresensky District of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia. In the northern part of its distribution area, it borders the Northwestern Mari language, with which it together occupies the western regions of Mari language distribution. The main differences between Hill Mari and Meadow Mari are phonological, and to a lesser extent, morphological.
It is written using the Hill Mari Cyrillic script and is co-official with Russian as well as Meadow Mari in the Mari El Republic. Media in Hill Mari includes the newspapers Zhera and Yamdy li!, the literary journal U sem, and broadcasts on Gornomariysky Radio.
Number of speakers
According to the 2002 Russian Census, 36,822 people reported knowledge of Hill Mari. The 2010 Russian Census recorded 23,062 speakers.
Dialects
Hill Mari comprises two main dialect groups:
Mountain dialect
Spoken on the right bank of the Volga River, this dialect forms the basis of the literary language. It includes the following subdialects:
Yelasovsky — basis of the literary standard
Kuznetsovsky
Yemangashsky
Vilovatovsky
Forest dialect
Spoken on the left bank of the Volga, it includes:
Kuzminsky
Kilemarsky
Ardinsky
Yuksarsky
Phonology
Hill Mari is characterized by vowel harmony (syngharmonism), which is particularly well developed in the mountain dialect.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hill Mari language” 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.