Komi-Permyak (, , or , ), also known as Permyak, is one of two
Permic varieties in the
Uralic language family
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...
that form a
pluricentric language, the other being
Komi-Zyryan.
Udmurt is another Permic language spoken outside of the region and not a member of the Komi pluricentric language.
The Komi-Permyak language, spoken in
Perm Krai
Perm Krai (, ; ) is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (a Krais of Russia, krai), located in Eastern Europe. Its administrative center is Perm, Russia, Perm. The population of the krai was 2,532,405 (2021 Russian census, 2021 ...
of
Russia
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...
and written using the Komi
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Easte ...
, was co-official with
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
in the
Komi-Permyak Okrug of Perm Krai.
Glottonym
The original name of the Komi-Permyak language is ''коми кыв'' "Komi language", identical with the native name of the Komi-Zyryan language.
In the 1920s, the
Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
authorities introduced the new name for the Komi language in the Perm Region as ''коми-пермяцкий язык'', the Komi-Permian language, combining the native name of the language with the Russian one. The new name was transliterated in Komi as ''коми-пермяцкöй кыв'' 'Komi-Permyak language'. In this way, the local language was nominally separated from the Komi-Zyryan language, that officially received the original name, the Komi language. The
Komis of the Perm Region had to officially use the new name, even though it has negative connotations for the speakers, continuing to use the original name, the Komi language, exclusively in their colloquial speech.
Only in the early years of the first decade of the 2000s has there begun a controversial process of replacing the offensive official name with a more correct one. The term ''перем коми кыв'' 'Permian Komi language' was proposed and it is used nowadays (alongside the old term) in local mass-media, in scientific papers and in the Komi-Permyak version of Wikipedia.
Dialects
All of the Komi-Permyak dialects are easily mutually intelligible and, to a lesser extent, mutually intelligible with the Komi-Zyryan dialects.

The Komi-Permyak dialects may be divided geographically into Northern and Southern groups, and phonemically into /l/ and /v/ groups:
# Northern
#*/l/ type: лым /lɨm/ "snow", вӧл /vɘl/ "a horse", вӧлтӧг /vɘltɘg/ "without a horse", вӧлӧн /vɘlɘn/ "with a horse, on a horse"
#**Upper
Lupya
#**Mysy (former rural council)
#**
Kosa-
Kama
''Kama'' (Sanskrit: काम, ) is the concept of pleasure, enjoyment and desire in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. It can also refer to "desire, wish, longing" in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh literature.Monier Williamsका� ...
#**
Kochevo
#**Zyuzdino (
Afanasyevo)
#**
Yazva
# Southern
#*/v/ type: вым /vɨm/, вӧв /vɘv/, вӧвтӧг /vɘvtɘg/, вӧвӧн /vɘvɘn/
#**
Kudymkar-
Inva
#**Lower Inva
#*Southern /l/ type: лым /lɨm/, вӧл /vɘl/, вӧлтӧг /vɘltɘg/, вӧлӧн /vɘlɘn/
#**On
#**
Nerdva
Formerly a southern dialect group existed in the
Obva river basin, but it is now extinct except for the Nerdva dialect. Because of this the latter is nowadays usually considered together with the central group, which in this way has become "southern".
The central (new southern) and northern groups of Komi-Permyak are spoken in
Komi Okrug of
Perm Krai
Perm Krai (, ; ) is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (a Krais of Russia, krai), located in Eastern Europe. Its administrative center is Perm, Russia, Perm. The population of the krai was 2,532,405 (2021 Russian census, 2021 ...
, where the language was standardized in the 1920s. The modern standard is based on Kudymkar dialect of the central group, but many elements of northern dialects were included as well, so that the "literary language" has significant differences in its morphological system from the "main" dialect.
The central dialects, spoken in the
Ińva river basin, differ considerably from the other Komi-Permyak dialects due to the general shift of etymological /l/ to /v/, then to /w/, and finally to the disappearance of the consonant, which has triggered significant changes in morphology.
The differences between the Kudymkar and Uliś Ińva dialects are mainly in accentuation: the Uliś Ińva has a phonological stress (the Öń too), whereas the Kudymkar dialect (like as Ńerdva) has a morphological one. The Ńerdva dialect retains the etymological /l/. The same can be said about the Öń dialect (recently extinct), that had connections with the eastern Permian.
The northern group of the Permian dialects (upon
Kösva,
Kama
''Kama'' (Sanskrit: काम, ) is the concept of pleasure, enjoyment and desire in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. It can also refer to "desire, wish, longing" in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh literature.Monier Williamsका� ...
and
Lup rivers) was under a strong Zyryan influence on all levels. The Köć and Kös dialects are closely related with some Syktyv dialects of Zyryan, whereas the Lup dialect was in tenuous connections with the
Upper Ezhva dialect for a long time.
The Komi-Permyak standard language refers only to the central and northern groups of the Komi-Permyak dialects. They can be called as proper Permian dialects. The other two groups are marginal.
An only relic of the eastern Permian is the
Yaźva dialect, ca. 200 speakers of the ca. 900 ethnical Komis in
Krasnovishersky District of Perm Krai. In the early 2000s (decade) it was standardized by authority of the krai. The dialect has archaic system of
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s (including /ö/, /ü/ and /ʌ/), while its accentuation is similar to Uliś Ińva's and its lexical system is like the Northern Permian one.
The Western Permian group is represented by another marginal dialect, Źuźdin (ca. 1000 persons living in
Kirov Oblast
Kirov Oblast ( rus, Кировская область, p=ˈkʲirəfskəjə ˈobləsʲtʲ) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast) located in Eastern Europe. Its administrative center is the city of Kirov. As of the 2010 census, the population ...
near the border of Komi Okrug).
Phonology
In the Komi-Permyak standard language there are the same 26 main consonants and 7 vowels as in Komi-Zyryan.
Consonants
Komi-Permyak's modern consonant system includes 26 native ones, and the additional consonants /ts/, /f/, /x/ in Russian loanwords. In traditional speech the "foreign sounds" were replaced with /t͡ɕ/, /p/, and /k/, respectively.
# Only in Russian loanwords.
# There is also a phoneme // which mostly occurs paralinguistically and only in 1 word ''Бунгаг''
�uŋɡaɡoutside it.
Vowels
The Komi-Permyak vowel system can be considered as being three-dimensional, where vowels are characterised by three features: front and back, rounded and unrounded and vowel height.
Komi-Permyak does not distinguish between long and short vowels and does not have vowel harmony. There are no diphthongs; when two vowels come together, which occurs at some morpheme boundaries, each vowel retains its individual sound.
Writing system
Both regional standards of the Komi language have an identical alphabet, introduced in 1938. The alphabet (anbur, анбур) includes all the Russian letters plus two additional
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...
s: і and ӧ.
Grammar
Komi-Permyak is an
agglutinating language
An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations) ...
. It uses
affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...
es to express
possession, to specify mode, time, and so on.
Nouns
All Permian Komi nouns are
declined for number,
case
Case or CASE may refer to:
Instances
* Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design
* Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type
Containers
* Case (goods), a package of relate ...
and possession, adding special suffixes to word stems.
Number
In Permian Komi there are two
grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a Feature (linguistics), feature of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement (linguistics), agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and many other ...
s: singular and
plural
In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...
. The singular is the unmarked form of a word, and the plural is obtained by inflecting the singular.
The plural marker of nouns is /ez/ (orthographically ''эз'' or ''ез'') immediately following a word stem before any case or other affixes. The last consonant of the stem before the plural suffix has to be duplicated.
The plural suffix has also a reduced variant (a "weak form") /е/ (orth. ''э'' or ''е''), that is used combining with some weak forms of possessive suffixes, e.g. ки
эт 'your (Sg.) hands ' versa ки
эз 'hands'.
Possession
The Permian Komi possessive suffixes are added to the end of nouns either before or after a case suffix depending on case. The three suffixes of singular possession have in addition to their main forms the weak variants used combining with a weak form of plural suffix, weak forms of some cases or forming the suffixes of plural possession.
#
The weak variants of the suffix
#
The element ны is a marker of plural possession
The possessive suffix of 3Sg is widely used also as a definite article. In colloquial speech it is the main meaning of this suffix.
Cases
It is assumed, that the Permian Komi standard language has eighteen noun
cases: ten grammatical cases and eight locative cases. The disputes continue about the status of some monosyllabic postpositions and a set of dialectal reduced forms of postpositions that can be treated as case suffixes too. The maximal number of all possible cases reaches 30.
The case suffixes are added to the end of nouns either before or after a possessive suffix depending on case. Some cases have weak variants of their suffixes combining with the weak variants of possessive suffixes.
Adjectives
Used attributively, Permian Komi adjectives precede the nouns they modify, and are not declined: басöк нывка 'beautiful girl' → басöк нывкаэслö 'to the beautiful girls'.
However most adjectives can also be used as nouns and sometimes as appositions, in which case they are declined: e.g. ыджыт ("big") → ыджыттэзісь ("out of the bigs"). The declensional paradigma is the same as by nouns, except the main accusative form, that became by adjectives suffix ö instead of öс or a null morpheme by nouns: адззи басöк нывкаöс 'I have found a beautiful girl' → адззи басöкö 'I have found a beautiful
irl.
Being predicative an adjective agrees with the subject for number. The plural marker of the predicative is öсь: керкуыс ыджыт 'the house is big ' → керкуэc ыджытöсь 'the houses are big'.
The adjective in Permian Komi have five degrees of comparison
The comparative and the superlative compare the intensity of an object's quality with the other object's one. The sative, excessive and diminutive compare the intensity of the quality with its basic degree.
Numerals
The numerals in Komi-Permyak
[Коми-пермяцкий язык: Введение, фонетика, лексика и морфология / под ред. и при соавт. проф. В. И. Лыткина. Кудымкар: Коми-перм. кн. изд-во, 1962.]
Personal pronouns
Komi personal pronouns inflect in all the cases. The language makes no distinction between ''he'','' she'' and ''it''. The nominative case of personal pronouns are listed in the following table:
Verbs
Permian Komi verbs show tense (
present
The present is the period of time that is occurring now. The present is contrasted with the past, the period of time that has already occurred; and the future, the period of time that has yet to occur.
It is sometimes represented as a hyperplan ...
,
future
The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ex ...
,
past
The past is the set of all Spacetime#Definitions, events that occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human ...
), mood (
indicative
A realis mood ( abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentence
Dec ...
,
imperative,
evidential,
optative
The optative mood ( or ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative ...
,
conditional and
conjunctive),
voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...
and
aspect.
The verbal stem is a 2nd person singular of imperative mode: мун 'go', кер 'make'. All the other forms are formed by adding suffixes to the stem.
Some verbal stems having a consonant cluster at the end become expanded with a so-called "voyelle de soutien" which is dropped before the suffixes beginning with a vowel: = 'hear', 'swear' = , e. g. 'to hear', 'by hearing' but 'I heard', 'he hears', 'you hear'. Thus, these stems with a consonant cluster have their full und reduced variants.
Permian
infinitive
Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs that do not show a tense. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all ...
s are marked with added to a stem as in 'to go', 'hear'
All Permian Komi verbs are conjugated in the same way, except for the defective verb 'to be'.
Negation is mostly expressed by a conjugated negator preceding the stem, e. g. 'I didn't go'.
The indicative mood has three tenses: present, future and past. The main marker of the present and future tense is а (negat. о), the marker of the past tense is и (negat. э).
Here is conjugation of verb керны 'make, do':
:
Notes.
#
Present and future forms differ just in affirm. 3rd person (ö / öны to ас / асö).
#
Future and past forms differ only with tense marker (the future -а / о- to the past -и / э-).
#
In present affirmative forms the marker of 3rd person is -ö, which at the same time indicates the tense.
Some phrases
Bibliography
*Аксёнова, О. П. (2009). ''Коми-пермяцкие географические термины и их функционирование в топонимии Верхнего Прикамья''. Кудымкар: ПНЦ УрО РАН.
*Баталова, Р. М. (1982). ''Ареальные исследования по восточным финно-угорским языкам (коми языки)''. Москва: Изд-во «Наука».
*Баталова, Р. М. (1975). ''Коми-пермяцкая диалектология''. Москва: Изд-во «Наука».
*Баталова, Р. М., Кривощекова-Гантман А. С. (1985). ''Коми-пермяцко-русский словарь.'' – М.: Русский язык.
*Кривощекова-Гантман, А. С. (2006). ''Собрание сочинений в 2 томах.'' Пермь: Перм. гос. пед. ун-т. ; .
*Лобанова, А. С., Шляхова, С. С. (2010). ''Коми-пермяцкий язык конца ХХ – начала ХХІ веков: стилистические аспекты.'' Пермь: Перм. гос. пед. ун-т.
*Лыткин В. И. и др. (1962). ''Коми-пермяцкий язык: Введение, фонетика, лексика и морфология'' / под ред. и при соавт. проф. В. И. Лыткина. Кудымкар: Коми-перм. кн. изд-во.
*Пономарева, Л. Г. (2002). ''Фонетика и морфология мысовско-лупьинского диалекта коми-пермяцкого языка: дис. ... канд. филол. наук''. Ижевск.
*Попова, О. А. (2010). ''Коми-пермяцкий фразеологический словарь''. Пермь: Перм. гос. пед. ун-т.
*Тудвасева З.К. и др. (2008). ''Русско-коми-пермяцкий разговорник.'' Кудымкар: Коми-Перм. кн. изд-во.
*Цыпанов, Е. А. (1999). ''Перым-коми гижӧд кыв''. Сыктывкар: «Пролог» небöг лэдзанін.
Further reading
* Fedosejeva, Jelena. "Замечания по лексикологии коми-пермяцкого языка (с этимологиями)"
ome Lexicological Remarks on the Komi-Permyak Language In: ''Linguistica Uralica'' 53, nr. 3, 2017. pp. 179–185. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.3176/lu.2017.3.02
* Kochetov, Alexei, and Alevtina Lobanova. “Komi-Permyak Coronal Obstruents: Acoustic Contrasts and Positional Variation”. In: ''Journal of the International Phonetic Association'' 37, no. 1 (2007): 51–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44526448.
References
External links
Books in Komi-Permyak from Finno-Ugric Electronic Library(by the Finno-Ugric Information Center in
Syktyvkar
Syktyvkar (, , ; , ) is the capital city of the Komi Republic in Russia, as well as its largest city. It is also the administrative center of the Syktyvkar Urban Okrug. Until 1930, it was known as Ust-Sysolsk after the Sysola, Sysola River.
Ety ...
,
Komi Republic
The Komi Republic (; ), sometimes simply referred to as Komi, is a republics of Russia, republic of Russia situated in the northeast of European Russia. Its capital city, capital is the types of inhabited localities in Russia, city of Syktyvka ...
(interface in Russian and English, texts in
Mari, Komi,
Udmurt,
Erzya and
Moksha
''Moksha'' (; , '), also called ''vimoksha'', ''vimukti'', and ''mukti'', is a term in Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism for various forms of emancipation, liberation, '' nirvana'', or release. In its soteriological and eschatologic ...
languages))
Баталова Р. М. Коми-пермяцкий язык.Кривощёкова-Гантман А.С. Коми-пермяцко-русский словарь. (Krivoshchokova-Gantman A.S. Komi-Permyak-Russian Dictionary)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Komi-Permyak Language
Komi language
Indigenous languages of European Russia
Agglutinative languages