Udmurtia's name probably means 'meadow people', a label recorded back in 1557
West of the Urals, between the Kama and Vyatka rivers, lies a Russian republic named after a Finno-Ugric people whose ancestors may never have moved. Scholars consider the Udmurts the only Finno-Ugric group still living largely in the likely ancestral homeland of that whole language family.
The most common explanation of the name splits it in two. The first part comes from a Permic root meaning meadow or glade, and a document from 1557 describes the Udmurts as meadow people. The second part, murt, means person and is thought to be an early borrowing from a Scythian word, itself traced back to an Indo-Aryan term for a mortal man. Not everyone agrees: the researchers Napolskikh and Belykh propose a borrowing from an Indo-Iranian word for edge or boundary, or a Turkic one meaning sworn comrade.
Modern Udmurtia began on 4 November 1920 as the Votyak Autonomous Oblast, using the old Russian name for the people. It became the Udmurt Autonomous Oblast in 1932, an autonomous Soviet republic in 1934, and during the Second World War received many factories evacuated from Ukraine and the western borderlands. On October 11, 1991, it adopted its present name, the Udmurt Republic. Its capital, Izhevsk, is the region's industrial and cultural hub.
Udmurts are now a minority in their own republic, at 24.1 percent of residents in the 2021 census against 67.7 percent Russians, though more than two-thirds of all Udmurts live there. Beliefs are varied: a 2012 survey found about a third of people Russian Orthodox, 29 percent spiritual but not religious, and small followings for native faiths including Udmurt Vos. Ashkenazi Jews arrived in the 1830s and developed a local Yiddish, known as Udmurtish, dotted with Udmurt and Tatar loanwords.
The population has shrunk steadily since the last Soviet count, dropping by more than 150,000 people over three decades.
Source: Udmurtia
