The language proved more durable than the census box: what Fenno-Ugria saw in Russia's census

Fenno-Ugria, the Estonian organisation that has been connecting the Finno-Ugric peoples for nearly a century, maintains on its website a continuously updated dossier on the Erzya — quite possibly the most attentive outside view of our people that exists today. In the latest revision of the Erzya profile, the Tallinn observers examined the results of Russia's 2020–2021 census, and their analysis deserves a conversation of its own: in figures that Russian statistics present as uninterrupted decline, the view from outside discerned something more complex — and more interesting.

First, the numbers themselves. The count of people recorded as "Mordvins" fell by a third between the 2010 and 2021 censuses: 484,450 against 744,236, minus 34.9 per cent. Those who gave their nationality as Erzya numbered 50,086, against 84,407 a decade earlier. And then comes the finding that made the Estonian analysis worth reading: the number of people naming Erzya as their mother tongue did not fall but rose — from 36,726 in 2010 to 40,045 in 2020. Against the backdrop of a general collapse in every "Mordvin" indicator, the language line is the only one that went up.

Here editorial honesty is required, and it concerns the source itself. The Fenno-Ugria text puts the decline in the number of Erzya at 12.1 per cent — yet its own figures say otherwise: from 84,407 to 50,086 is minus 40.7 per cent. A calculation error appears to have crept into the profile. This matters for more than accuracy's sake: without the correction one gets the comforting picture that "Erzya identity was barely affected", while with it the picture is starker — and deeper. Ethnic self-identification as Erzya shrank even faster than the umbrella category "Mordvin" — which makes it all the more striking that language loyalty grew at the same time.

What emerges, then, once the verified numbers are put side by side? Of the 50,000 people who registered as Erzya, 40,000 named Erzya as their mother tongue — four in five. For a sense of scale: across the entire half-million "Mordvin" population, a noticeably smaller share names either of the two languages as native. In other words, the "Erzya" box in the 2021 census gathered not people casually retaining an old "Mordvin" entry in their papers but a core — those for whom the name of the people and the language are inseparable. The shrinking of the ethnic line and the growth of the language line are not a contradiction but a single process: diffuse administrative affiliation is melting away, while distinct affiliation is concentrating. The census, without meaning to, showed where the nation's heart lies.

To Fenno-Ugria's credit, its dossier is not confined to demography. It is the Estonian observers who consistently record what the official chronicle keeps silent about: that Raśkeń Ozks, the traditional all-Erzya prayer gathering that became an official holiday of Mordovia in 2004, has lost its sacred character; that in 2022 the Erzya national flag was banned from the event and the public speeches were delivered in Russian; that Erzya Language Day has been renamed and folded into state ideology. The value of the view from outside is not that it is kinder or harsher than the view from within — it is that it is not obliged to use someone else's boxes. Where Russian statistics see "Mordvins" and "the Mordvin language", Tallinn calmly writes: the Erzya, the Erzya language — and counts them separately, as far as the census itself allows.

One caveat cannot be omitted: comparing the 2010 and 2021 censuses is methodologically imperfect — the wording of the language questions differed, and the 2021 census was conducted during the pandemic and drew plenty of criticism over its quality. The rise from 36,700 to 40,000 may partly reflect people who previously wrote "Mordvin" now naming their language more precisely. But if so, that is the news itself: the exact name of the language is displacing the administrative one. Everyone who entered "Erzya" in the census instead of "Mordvin" cast a vote for the existence of their language.

Valks sees in the Estonian analysis a confirmation of what our project stands on: the Erzya language has a core of speakers that is not dissolving but becoming self-aware — and that core deserves an infrastructure worthy of its loyalty. Forty thousand people who named the language as their mother tongue in defiance of every box are forty thousand reasons to keep building the dictionary.