Today the Moksha language is one of the statelanguages 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.
Moksha language (moksha) is a language related toMordovian subgroup, Finno-Volga group, Finno-Ugric branch, Ural language group. That is, the language can be considered a "distant relative" of Finnish, Estonian, Udmurt and other small languages common in the Urals. The closest to him is now the dead Meshchersky. To date, the Mokshan language has only about two thousand people, that is, it can be attributed to the disappearing.
In the first centuries of our era on the territory of modernMordovia was a single Mordovian language or a set of related Mordvinian dialects. Approximately in the V-VI century the discrepancy of the latter became so strong that they turned into two related, but independent languages - Moksha and Erzya.
There are 7 vowel phonemes in the language and 33consonants, which are represented in the letter with 21 letters. The stress, as a rule, falls on the first syllable, and in pairs of words like "atyat-babat" ("old man with an old woman") falls on each of the parts.
The Moksha language belongs to the so-calledagglutinative languages. This is a type in which each grammatical meaning is expressed by an individual morpheme (unlike Russian, where the ending of a noun, for example, expresses a whole complex of grammatical meanings).
Here there is a huge number of cases (togetherwith obsolete and rarely used, there are about 20 of them) expressing different shades of semantic meanings. Nouns vary in three declensions: the basic, the index and the possessive. It is interesting that in the named language there is no category of the genus - it is not grammatically expressed.
Curious and grammatical system of Mokshathe verb. There are four of his time: the past two, the present-future and the complex future. In this system, the modality of the verb is not represented, the category expressing reality-the unreality of action, the obligation.
For those interested, there are severallexicographic publications: etymological Moksha dictionary edited by Vershinin VI (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, Cyrillic alphabet is used to display sounds on the letter, that is, the modern Moksha alphabet is no different from Russian.
Currently in this language in Mordoviaa large number of periodicals is published, as well as a small amount of fiction and scientific literature. The schools have lessons in the Moksha language, it is also studied in high schools, it sounds on the national Mordovian radio and television. However, it can not be said that the language fully functions in all spheres of society in the whole region. Among the urban population, there were almost no native speakers - it was replaced by the Russian. Moksha is used mainly in rural areas, gradually acquiring the status of a dialect. Although a few dozen years ago the Moksha speech was not uncommon.
Today in the world processes are actively undergoingglobalization, unification and absorption of small numbers more numerous. In this regard, many interesting cultures, unfortunately, wear off from the face of the earth and acquire the status of the dead, small languages such as Mokshan, Erzya and others are dying out.
