Northwest Mari

The number of carriers is about 7,000. The exact figure cannot be given due to the fact that during the All-Russian population censuses the north-western language was taken into account as part of the meadow-Mari or simply Mari language. The approximate number of speakers is derived from the total number of Northwest Mari 15,000. (according to the 2010 census ) ^[2] and the percentage of proficiency in the Mari language among them - 58.5% in 2002 ^[3] .

The first attempts to create literary texts for the Mari, who inhabit the Middle Powers, were made in the XVIII century . The work of the Nizhny Novgorod Theological Seminary , founded in 1721, is connected with this work. According to N.I. Isanbaev, the 5-language dictionary of Damaskin, published at that time, was compiled "mainly on the basis of the mountain and northwestern dialects of the Mari language." Nevertheless, there was no analysis of all the dialects and the allocation of a separate north-western among them at that time.

The well-known Finno-Ugricologist Mihkel Veske was the first to compare the speech of the Mari in different regions of their residence. During his expedition to the Iranian Mari in 1888 , he singled out their language in a separate dialect as part of a mountain (western) dialect, as opposed to a meadow (eastern) one.

The first who proposed singling out the language of the northwestern Mari in a separate dialect different from both the language of the mountain and meadow Mari was V. A. Mukhin . According to the results of the linguistic expedition of 1934, he admitted the possibility of considering it a separate Sanchur-Yaran (North-Mountain-Mari) dialect.

The position of the northwestern dialect as a separate, fourth dialect of the Mari language was finally grounded on the materials of the 1958 Dialectological Expedition MARNIIALI by L. P. Gruzov and I. S. Galkin ^[4] .

On April 9, 2019, an application was submitted by A.V. Solomin (in cooperation with an employee of MARNIIALI A.V. Chemyshev ) for assigning the jmy code to the ISO 639-3 standard of the International Organization for Standardization .

• Tuzharov, Gennady Matveevich
• Ivanov, Ivan Grigorievich
• Utyatin, Andrey Alekseevich
• Andrianova, Elena Mikhailovna

Phonetics and Phonology

The northwestern language is distinguished by the largest number of vowels in the Mari language, there are 12 of them ^[5] : the front row - and, e, ӧ, ӧ, ӱ, ӫ, ӹ , the back row - a, o, y, ө, s . Consonantism is represented by bilabial consonants - n, b, m , pre-lingual - l, r, d, s, t, c, n, s, w, w , medium-speaking - n, e, th, t , posterolinguistic - k, ҥ, g . In Russian borrowings of late time are found - f, x, b, h ^[6] .

In the dialects of the northwestern Mari language, both palatal-velar and labial vowel harmony are observed. The emphasis in words is mainly on the penultimate syllable, as in the Mountain Mari language.

Morphology

Noun

Adjective Name

Numeral

Numbers from one to twenty one:

Syntax

Vocabulary

The vocabulary includes a number of words that are absent in other Mari dialects. According to the calculation made by I. Egorov, in the Tonshaev dialect of the northwest dialect there are 29.2% of the words common with the mountain dialect, 21.3% with the meadow-eastern dialect and 27.7% of the words used only in this dialect ^{[7 ]} , for example tsitsi ( meadow meadow. shyl, yur , gornomar. share ) “meat”, nurg ( meadow lug . ӱmbal , mountain mar . patiul ) “cream”, karak ( meadow meadow. kande , mountain mar . simsӹ ) “blue”, etc.

Colors

• Yaran dialect is the largest in terms of distribution and number of speakers, the basis of the written language.
  • Kyknur
  • Tuzhinsky plot
  • Sanchursky agreement
• Sharang dialect is closest to the mountain dialect ^[8]
• Tonshaevsky dialect
• Lipschinsky dialect

Northwest Mari Alphabet

The language has a written status with the publication in 1995 of the first experimental book - “Mare Primer”. It used the Cyrillic alphabet with the inclusion of all the letters of both the meadow-eastern Mari and Mountain Mari languages ​​in accordance with the presence of phonemes in both languages. For two vowels not found in other Mari literary norms, the letters ẙ, ӱ̊ were used. The use of these letters caused a certain inconvenience - none of them was added to Unicode : the first (ẙ) is used only in two Pamir languages ( Rushan and Shugnan ), and the second (ӱ̊) is generally unique, created by the authors of the book. Currently, in Russian-language publications, where there are phrases in the northwestern Mari language, as well as on billboards and signs in the Kirov and Nizhny Novgorod regions, the alphabet with the additional letters ө, ӫ is used ^[9] . These characters are entered into the Unicode system and are used in the scripts of several languages ​​of the Russian Federation.

• Dmitriev S. D., Dmitrieva V. M., Tuzharov G. M. Mare primer: Iktӹmshӹ class textbook. — Yoshkar-Ola: Mare books and publishing housesӹ, 1995.
• Ivanov I.G., Tuzharov G.M. Northwest dialect of the Mari language / Dialects of the Mari language. — Vol. I.— Yoshkar-Ola, 1970.
• Ivanov I.G., Tuzharov G.M. Dictionary of the northwestern dialect of the Mari language / Dialects of the Mari language. — Vol. II.— Yoshkar-Ola, 1971.
• Dialects of the Mari language // Encyclopedia of the Republic of Mari El / Otv. ed. N. I. Saraeva. - Yoshkar-Ola, 2009 .-- S. 337—338. - 872 s. - 3505 copies. - ISBN 978-5-94950-049-1 .
• Mari northwestern // Encyclopedia of the Republic of Mari El / Otv. ed. N. I. Saraeva. - Yoshkar-Ola, 2009. - S. 523-524. - 872 s. - 3505 copies. - ISBN 978-5-94950-049-1 .
• Ivanov I.G. Phonetics of the Tonshaev dialect of the Mari language. Diss. Cand. filol. Sciences .-- Tartu, 1965.
• Tuzharov G.M. Yaran dialect of the Mari language (morphological characteristic). Diss. Cand. filol. Sciences .-- Tartu, 1966.
• Utyatin A.A. Sharang dialect in the system of Mari dialects. Diss. Cand. filol. Sciences. — Yoshkar-Ola, 2006.
• Andrianova E.M. Northwest dialect in the system of dialects of the Mari language. Diss. Doct. filol. sciences.
• Egorov I. The vocabulary of the northwestern dialect of the Mari language // Transactions of MarNI. — issue. XV .-- Yoshkar-Ola, 1961.

• Mari in Tonshaevo? They will! Finno-Ugric Cultural Center of the Russian Federation
• Japanese scientist explores the northwestern dialect of the Mari language. Finno-Ugric Cultural Center of the Russian Federation