ABSTRACT
In the 1989 Soviet census 747,000 people declared themselves to be of Udmurt nationality; of these approximately 70 per cent (thus c.520,000 people) speak the language of their ancestors.
Two-thirds (c.500,000) of the Udmurt (older name: Votyak) live in the Udmurt Republic (Udmurtia), which is located between the Vyatka and Kama Rivers and forms a part of the Russian Federation. The area of Udmurtia is 42,000 km2, its population is 1.6 million; its capital is the industrial city Izhevsk, with 635,000 inhabitants. The Udmurt are thus a minority within their own republic. (Breakdown by nationality: Udmurt 31 per cent, Russian 59 per cent, Tatar and other 10 per cent.) The distribution of the Udmurt population is not homogeneous: their proportions are greater in villages than in the cities. So for example 16.5 per cent of the population of Izhevsk is Udmurt, but in Alnasi province the Udmurt make up more than 80 per cent. This disproportion is characteristic of language use, as well. Generally in the villages 95 per cent of the Udmurt population speak their mother tongue, while in the cities the proportion is considerably lower. This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that in urban schools no provision for education in Udmurt was provided under the Soviet system.
