World Language Map

Where is Udmurt spoken?

Udmurt (Удмурт кыл) is an Uralic language, spoken in Russia and Kazakhstan. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Udmurt is spoken

Udmurt is spoken in 2 countries: Russia and Kazakhstan. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Russia0.4%535,120
KazakhstanNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Udmurt is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Udmurt.

How many people speak Udmurt?

Wikidata gives about 270,000 first-language speakers (Federal State Statistics Service, 2020). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Udmurt sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Udmurt as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Uralic
  2. Permian
  3. Udmurt

More about Udmurt

Codes: ISO 639-3 udm, Glottolog udmu1245. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Udmurt

Where is Udmurt spoken?

Udmurt is spoken in Russia and Kazakhstan. Unicode CLDR puts it at 0.4% of the population of Russia, which is about 535,120 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Udmurt?

Wikidata gives about 270,000 first-language speakers (Federal State Statistics Service, 2020). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Udmurt in?

Glottolog places Udmurt in the Uralic family, in the branch Permian.

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