Erzya beyond the Volga: the state of the language in Samara oblast

Samara oblast has historically been one of the largest areas of Erzya settlement outside the Republic of Mordovia. Modern statistics, however, are a poor guide to the community's real size. In the census conducted in 2021, 29,659 residents of the region declared their nationality as "Mordvin", while only 428 gave their nationality as Erzya — a Finno-Ugric people whose language is spoken mainly in Mordovia and the neighbouring regions of the Volga basin. How many Erzya are hidden inside the consolidated census category is unknown. We looked at what lies behind these figures: how the Erzya came to live beyond the Volga, what is happening with schooling, organisations and the media — and how much of what was built over a century has already been lost.

The Erzya presence in the Samara Volga region does not begin with the peasant colonisation of the modern era. According to the ethnocultural map published by the regional House of Friendship of Peoples, archaeologists know of twelve sites of the Golden Horde period where objects bearing features characteristic of Mordvin material culture have been found: three burial grounds, seven settlements, a hillfort and a hoard. After the break-up of the Golden Horde, most of that population presumably left the region. A new wave of migration began in the mid-sixteenth century; permanent settlements appeared in the second half of the seventeenth century — on the right bank of the Volga, and on the left bank in the wake of the Zakamskaya defensive line — and the villages of Verkhneye and Nizhneye Sancheleyevo are documented from 1700. In the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries migration continued as part of the free and state-organised settlement of the trans-Volga lands: Erzya and Moksha settled near the fortified lines and took up the forest-steppe and steppe lands of the future Samara, Stavropol, Bugulma, Buguruslan and Buzuluk districts.

By the end of the nineteenth century the trans-Volga lands had become one of the main centres of Erzya life. In the census of 1897, Samara governorate ranked first among the governorates of the Russian Empire by the number of inhabitants who named the "Mordvin dialect" as their mother tongue — 238,598 people. A large share of that group were Erzya, but the censuses of 1897 and 2021 measured different things. The first grouped the population by declared mother tongue. The modern census records the answers "Mordvin", "Erzya" and "Moksha" separately, but the consolidated category "Mordvin" predominates numerically, and its internal composition is unknown. The 1897 figure therefore shows the historical scale of the trans-Volga community, but it cannot be compared directly with modern data. What can be compared is the census series of 2002, 2010 and 2021, which records a sharp contraction of the "Mordvin" category within the present-day borders of Samara oblast.

In the past two decades the contraction has accelerated sharply. Between the censuses of 2002 and 2010 the number of people recorded as Mordvins in the region fell by roughly 24 per cent — from 86,000 to 65,447; between 2010 and 2021 it fell by a further 54.7 per cent, to 29,659 — an almost threefold drop in nineteen years. That is roughly one and a half times faster than the country-wide trend, in which the "Mordvin" category lost about 35 per cent, falling from 744,000 to 484,000. The statistics do not allow this decline to be broken down into causes: natural decrease, departure from the villages, assimilation and changing census self-identification probably all acted at once. Command of the language is also shrinking, though this is a separate indicator with its own dynamics: according to Fenno-Ugria, an Estonian NGO monitoring the Finno-Ugric peoples of Russia, 431,196 people across Russia spoke Erzya or Moksha in 2010, and 280,046 in 2021.

The community's historical geography is better known than its present state. According to an ethnographic survey published in 1994 in the book Mordva Zavolzhya ("The Mordvins beyond the Volga"), the largest zones of compact Erzya settlement lay in the Isakly, Shentala, Pokhvistnevo and Klyavlino districts; no current district-level statistics on the Erzya as such are publicly available. In these villages, families, folklore ensembles and local memory tied to Erzya culture persist; how widely the language is spoken at home today, no public data can say. Linguists continue to study the dialects of the Klyavlino and Shentala districts: local geographical vocabulary, plant names, nicknames and place names. Their studies record local words and meanings that are absent from, or rare in, literary Erzya.

Data on the teaching of the language are scarce. In the open documents of the Samara oblast ministry of education and in publicly available school curricula, the editors could not find a single functioning school where Erzya is taught as a subject in its own right. The attempts were not isolated: in 2011 a special supplementary-education class opened at Samara's school No. 23, with more than sixty pupils reported to have enrolled, and in 2013 an Erzya-Moksha class began work at school No. 100, where language and history were taught and the ensemble Teshtine rehearsed. The editors found no current confirmation that these programmes continue. The online platform of Ogarev Mordovia State University in Saransk hosts a course in Erzya, and its list of supplementary programmes includes "Erzya as a foreign language"; whether enrolment is open to outside learners, the site does not say.

The gap was partly filled by enthusiasts. Radio Svoboda reported on a Samara Erzya language club founded around 2017 by Mikhail Potapov, who was born and grew up in Borskoye; his parents came from the Erzya village of Konovalovka. The first meetings took place in his wife's vacant workshop: the participants put on a samovar, met once a week, and Potapov prepared short grammar lessons. "At first, I suppose, I simply wanted to become one of my own," he explained: his relatives spoke Erzya among themselves, and he could not fully understand them. There have been no recent public reports of the club's activity; according to information available to the editors, the meetings have ceased, and Potapov himself — a participant in RAVO, an educational project devoted to the Erzya language — has withdrawn from language activism.

The Erzya-Moksha organisations of Samara have a long history and a district-level network. The regional society Mastorava emerged at the turn of 1989–1990: biographical sources date the start of its organisation to 1989, while the House of Friendship of Peoples' current page dates the society's founding to 1990. The regional national cultural autonomy lists branches in twelve districts of the oblast. The spring festival Mastoravań tundo and the regional folklore festival Mastorava have been held for decades — in 2025 the festival took place in Maly Tolkay. The Syzran festival Od tolyń či, the Day of New Fire, was transformed in 2018 into the interregional Finno-Ugric festival Parań pandoma. The public activity of these organisations is concentrated chiefly on festivals, stage folklore, costume, crafts and cuisine; the editors found no ongoing systematic language courses in their published programmes. Yet the stage remains a place where the language is heard: in June 2026 the House of Friendship of Peoples wrote about the Samara ensemble Erzya, founded by Alexander Marukhov — Erzya was spoken in the musician's family, and the group combines folk songs with contemporary arrangements, performing on Samara's stages.

Samara oblast also once had a press of its own with an Erzya-language section. The Valdo oyme society published a cultural and educational newspaper of the same name — "Bright Soul" — in Erzya, Moksha and Russian; its issues are preserved in the library of the regional House of Friendship of Peoples. From 1990 to 2002, programmes in Erzya by Chislav Zhuravlyov went out on regional radio and on Radio-7 from Samara; in 1999 his programme Erźań keleń či took first place in the Matthias Castrén Society's competition among 25 radio programmes in Finno-Ugric languages. Zhuravlyov himself (1935–2018), a native of Bolshoy Tolkay, was one of the most prominent Erzya authors of Samara oblast: according to biographical reference sources, a poet, writer and radio journalist who stood at the origins of Mastorava, the author of more than ten books and the collector of thousands of Erzya proverbs and sayings — valmerevkst. The column "Samara Erzya" used to run on the Golos Erzi web portal; today its domain no longer opens and the archive is inaccessible. No regular Erzya publication or radio programme could be found in the region today. The media environment, in other words, was not simply never built — it existed, and it was lost.

Three Samara lives trace the language's trajectory over the past thirty years: Zhuravlyov's radio broadcasts, Potapov's home study club, Marukhov's stage. The radio broadcasts ended, the language club did not become a lasting institution, and the most visible form of the language's public presence today is the stage. Samara oblast shows not only the scale of Erzya settlement but the fragility of a language without institutions of its own: beyond the Volga there once existed a newspaper with Erzya pages, radio broadcasting, a literary milieu and grassroots clubs, while today almost no public information exists about regular teaching, media or the passing of the language to children. Festival reports alone are not enough to assess the state of the language. What is needed is field research in the villages themselves and the testimony of their residents: who still speaks Erzya at home, whether the language is being passed to children, and where it can be heard beyond the stage.

From the Valks editors. The dictionary has room for the dialects of the Samara Erzya: we welcome recordings of speech and vocabulary from the Isakly, Shentala, Klyavlino and Pokhvistnevo districts, and we invite speakers from the region to join the project.