Where the science of Erzya lives: a survey of the world's Finno-Ugric journals

The science of a language lives in journals: as long as a language is being described, compared and reviewed, it remains a subject of world linguistics. We went through all the major periodicals of Finno-Ugric studies — from Helsinki to Saransk — to see what state they are in and what place the Erzya language occupies in them today. The picture turned out to be unexpected: the main centre of Erzya philology outside Russia proved to be not where we had assumed.

Begin with the general landscape. World Finno-Ugric studies rests on remarkably old publications: the Helsinki Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne is a hundred and forty years old (published since 1886), Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen a hundred and twenty-five (since 1901), and Tallinn's Linguistica Uralica is past sixty. All three have outlived empires and wars, but the present decade is squeezing them physically: as of this year, Linguistica Uralica comes out twice a year instead of four times, Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen moved to one volume a year back in 2020, and the Helsinki Journal appears "approximately annually" — volume 101, for 2025, came out in February 2026. At the same time an opposite movement is under way: all three journals have opened their pages completely. Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen has been digitised back to its first issue of 1901 and free to read since 2019; the Journal de la Société Finno-Ougrienne is open on the journal.fi platform; Linguistica Uralica charges neither authors nor readers. There is less of this science than there used to be — but all of it is now one click away, including from an Erzya village.

Now for where Erzya stands in that science. The answer will disappoint anyone looking in the most obvious place: Tallinn's Linguistica Uralica, which printed Erzya material for decades, published not a single article on either Erzya or Moksha in all of 2025 — while the volume carried five Udmurt studies and four each on Mari and Karelian. Tellingly, closed doors are not the reason: the Estonian academic publisher, which suspended submissions from authors at Russian institutions after 2022, made a single exception for this journal — and Udmurt, Komi and Mari linguists from Russia use it actively. The bridge to Tallinn stands — it is just that no one is crossing it from Saransk.

The living centre of Erzya philology turned up instead in Hungary. The department of Finno-Ugric linguistics at the University of Debrecen publishes the yearbook Folia Uralica Debreceniensia — and this, by our assessment, is the most "Erzya" Western publication today. The school of László Keresztes, author of the classic textbooks of Erzya and Moksha, continues in the work of Sándor Maticsák: the 2023 volume carries his etymological study of the history of the word for "beer"; the 2024 volume, his linguistic analysis of an eighteenth-century prayer, one of the early monuments of the written language; and in the same year Maticsák published a book on the Finno-Ugric material of the Orenburg expedition of 1768–1774 — Erzya, Mari and Udmurt words taken down by the travellers Pallas, Lepyokhin, Falck and Georgi a century and a half before the Erzya literary language was born. The department dedicated its jubilee volume of 2025 to Maticsák himself. And the Debrecen volume of 2021, in a survey of Erzya and Moksha lexicography, records a fact in which the Erzya can take particular pride: Kuzma Abramov's Erzya dictionary of 2002 was the first monolingual dictionary of any Finno-Ugric language other than the state languages Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian; the second such dictionary appeared, for Komi, only fourteen years later.

The second Western centre is Helsinki, where the Finno-Ugrian Society publishes, alongside its two journals, a monograph series in which Jack Rueter's fundamental Erzya dissertation appeared; Rueter and his colleagues remain the most active researchers of Erzya in Europe — though their efforts in recent years have shifted toward the digital infrastructure we have written about. In Russia, Erzya scholarship is concentrated in two journals: Finno-Ugric World in Saransk (published quarterly since 2008; it is the one we follow issue by issue) and the Yearbook of Finno-Ugric Studies in Izhevsk, where authors from Saransk publish regularly. The journal Finno-Ugrovedenie in Yoshkar-Ola, the Moscow-based Ural-Altaic Studies, and the Paris and Hamburg periodicals appear less frequently and print Erzya material only occasionally.

What follows from this survey? Three things. First: the Erzya language has not fallen out of world scholarship, but its geography has changed — its names today are Debrecen, Helsinki, Saransk and Izhevsk, and the Hungarian link in this chain has proved the strongest. Second: the shrinking of the journals is the shared misfortune of Uralic studies as a whole, but open licences have turned a century and a half of accumulated scholarship on Erzya into a freely available library that any teacher or student can use. Third, and least comfortable: the only place where Erzya is disappearing from the international journals is Saransk's own publishing activity abroad; the door is open, the exceptions have been made, the neighbours use them — Erzya linguistics, so far, does not. Valks, for its part, will take a practical step: we are adding all the publications named here to our permanent monitoring list and will tell our readers about every new Erzya study — wherever it appears, in Debrecen or in Saransk.