Languages of the Volga-Kama region

The languages of the Volga-Kama region include several Turkic and Uralic languages spoken in the Volga-Kama region (along the Volga and Kama rivers) in Russia. These include [varieties of] Tatar, Bashqort, Chuvash, Mari, Komi, Mordvin, and Udmurt (and linguistically, to some extent, Russian).

The master plan involves generating independent finite-state transducers for each language, and then making individual dictionaries and transfer rules for every pair. The current status of these goals is listed below.

Status

The ultimate goal is to have multi-purposable transducers for a variety of Volga-Kama languages. These can then be paired for X→Y translation with the addition of a CG for language X and transfer rules / dictionary for the pair X→Y. Below is listed development progress for each language's transducers and dictionary pairs.

Transducers

Once a transducer has ~80% coverage on a range of medium-large corpora we can say it is "working". Over 90% and it can be considered to be "production".

name	Language	ISO 639		formalism	state	stems	coverage	location	primary authors
		-2	-3
apertium-myv	Erzya	–	myv	HFST (lexc+twol)	development			apertium-myv-fin (incubator)	Fran, Jack Rueter
apertium-tat	Tatar	tt	tat	HFST (lexc+twol)	production	55,702	~91%	apertium-tat (languages)	Ilnar, Fran, Jonathan, Röstäm
apertium-chv	Chuvash	cv	chv	HFST (lexc+twol)	development	8,579	~85%	apertium-chv (languages)	Hèctor
apertium-bak	Bashkir	ba	bak	HFST (lexc+twol)	development	2,827	~66%	apertium-bak (languages)	Fran, Jonathan, Ilnar, Milli
apertium-mrj	Hill Mari	–	mrj	HFST (lexc+twol)	development			apertium-mrj-fin (incubator)	Fran, kuprina, jackrueter
apertium-udm	Udmurt	–	udm	HFST (lexc+twol)	prototype			apertium-udm-rus (nursery)	Fran, Trond, Andrey, Лукерья, Алексей
apertium-kpv	Komi-Zyrian	–	kpv	HFST (lexc+twol)	prototype			apertium-kpv-mhr (incubator)	Fran, Trond, Fedina, Andrei Chemyshev
apertium-mhr	Meadow Mari	–	mhr	HFST (lexc+twol)	prototype			apertium-kpv-mhr (incubator)	Fran, Fedina, Andrei Chemyshev

Existing language pairs

Text in italic denotes language pairs under development / in the incubator. Regular text denotes a functioning language pair in staging, while text in bold denotes a stable well-working language pair in trunk.

	tat	chv	bak	mrj	udm	mhr	myv	kpv
tat	-	cv-tt	tat-bak
chv	cv-tt	-
bak	tat-bak		-
mrj				-
udm					-
mhr						-		kpv-mhr
myv							-
kpv						kpv-mhr		-
fin				mrj-fin	fin-udm		myv-fin	kpv-fin
kaz	kaz-tat
kir	tat-kir
rus	tt-ru	cv-ru			udm-rus
tur	tur-tat	cv-tr

The languages

Volga-Kama languages by subgroup

• Turkic
  • North Qıpçaq: Tatar, Bashqort
  • Oğur: Chuvash

• Uralic → Finno-Ugric → Finno-Permic
  • Permic: Komi (Komi-Zyrian, Komi-Permyak, Komi-Yazva), Udmurt
  • Finno-Volgaic
    • Mari: Meadow Mari (Eastern), Hill Mari (Western)
    • Mordvin: Erzya, Moksha

Volga-Kama language vulnerability

The following table shows information about Volga-Kama varieties.

language	iso	num speakers	UNESCO classification
Tatar	tat	6500K	0. none
Bashqort	bak	1379K	1. vulnerable
Chuvash	chv	1325K	1. vulnerable
Udmurt	udm	0464K	2. definitely endangered
Mari - Eastern	mhr	0414K	2. definitely endangered
Mordvin - Erzya	myv	0400K	2. definitely endangered
Komi - Zyryan	kpv	0217K	2. definitely endangered
Mordvin - Moksha	mdf	0200K	2. definitely endangered
Komi - Permyak	koi	0094K	2. definitely endangered
Mari - Western	mrj	0037K	3. severely endangered
Komi - Yazva	koi	0000K	3. severely endangered

Existing computational resources

Corpora and corpora projects

• University of Turku - Research Unit for Volgaic Languages

Keyboards

• Xkb includes keyboards for the following languages:
  • Tatar
  • Chuvash
  • ...?

Morphological Transducers

• Mari