One defence in Saransk, three papers in Tartu: where research on Erzya lives

Two events of the past year show the state of academic research on Erzya, a Finno-Ugric language spoken mainly in the Republic of Mordovia and neighbouring regions of Russia. In August 2025, Tartu hosted the 14th International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies — the principal forum of world Uralic scholarship, which gathered around five hundred papers. Meanwhile, the defence announcements of Ogarev Mordovia State University in Saransk for 2025–2026 list two dissertations in the field of "languages of the peoples of Russia" — of which exactly one concerns Erzya. These figures are worth reading together.

The International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies (Congressus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum, CIFU) has been held every five years since 1960 and covers the whole field of Uralic studies, from linguistics and folklore to history, genetics and archaeology. The 14th congress was hosted by the Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics of the University of Tartu on 18–23 August 2025; the programme comprised seventeen symposia. The next congress, the 15th, will take place only in 2030, at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

The place of Erzya at this forum is easy to measure. In the list of accepted papers published on the congress website, the words Erzya, Moksha and Mordvin appear in the titles of three contributions: Mariann Bernhardt examined ablative-marked arguments of verbs of consumption in the Mordvinic languages, Polina Pleshak studied nominal phrases in Moksha, and Tatiana Devyatkina presented a paper on the concept of the soul in the traditional worldview of the Mordva. Three titles out of roughly five hundred papers — such is the current academic weight of languages spoken, according to the 2021 census, by about 280,000 people in Russia.

One reason is the rift between Russian and international Finno-Ugric studies. The Finnish translator and Finno-Ugrist Esa-Jussi Salminen, a veteran of six congresses, recalled in notes published by the MariUver portal the congress of 2000 in the same Tartu, with its numerous delegations from Russia — and observed that the participation of Russian scholars has fallen sharply, while at the Vienna congress of 2022 the war effectively excluded literary scholars from Russia from the programme. The scholars of Mordovia, home to the main school of Erzya linguistics, have found themselves cut off from the central venue of their own discipline.

Within Russia, too, the study of Erzya has contracted to isolated events. The dissertation council of Ogarev University, where theses are defended in speciality 5.9.5, "languages of the peoples of Russia", has announced two defences for 2025–2026: in June 2026 came the defence of Ekaterina Karpunina's dissertation "Representation of the conceptual field 'human being' in the phraseological units of the Erzya language" — Valks covered it in detail in June — and in February, Larisa Chernysheva defended a thesis on expressive syntax in Udmurt journalism. One Erzya dissertation a year: that is the current rate at which scholarship on the language reproduces itself.

Yet dissertations and congresses are not academic formalities. Dissertations grow into dictionaries, grammars and corpora; congresses connect researchers to world scholarship and its methods; new doctors of philology become teachers, editors and textbook authors. When a defence happens once a year and the international forum meets once in five years with hardly any Erzya topics, the reproduction of that whole chain slows down. Valks has already recorded a similar dynamic in academic publishing: the journal Linguistica Uralica has halved in size, and Erzya material appears ever more rarely in the world's Finno-Ugric journals.

Valks will follow both the defences in Saransk and the question of whether Erzya topics make it into the programme of the Budapest congress of 2030. Our own part of the work happens here: an open dictionary, coverage of new research, and a platform where data on the Erzya language is available to researchers in any country — regardless of which congresses they can travel to today.