The Merya language was the Finno-Ugric language spoken by the Merya tribe, which lived in what is today the Moscow region. Next to nothing is known about the language, but it was probably related to the Veps language and the Muromian language. Meryan probably became extinct in the Middle ages, as the Meryas were assimilated by the Slavs.
It is also an official language in Finland and an official minority language in Sweden, in the form of standard Finnish as well as Meänkieli, and in Norway in the form of Kven.
The Ruija dialect (Ruijan murre) is spoken in Finnmark (Finnish Ruija), in Norway.
The spoken language, on the other hand, is the main variety of Finnish to be used in popular TV and radio shows, at workplaces and may be preferred to speaking a dialect in personal communication.
Russian is the official language of Russia, and an official language of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the unrecognized Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russenorsk is an extinct pidgin language with mostly Russian vocabulary and mostly Norwegian grammar, used for communication between Russians and Norwegian traders in the Pomor trade in Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula.
The official language in Moscow and Novgorod, and later, in the growing Moscow Rus', remained a kind of Church Slavonic until the close of the seventeenth century, but, despite attempts at standardization, as by Meletius Smotrytsky c. 1620, its purity was by then strongly compromised by an incipient secular literature.
Feeds |
Contact