page_title: Mordvins
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mordvins / History
context_page_description: The Mordvins, also Mordva, Mordvinians, Mordovians, are a people who speak the Mordvinic languages of the Uralic language family and live mainly in the Republic of Mordovia and other parts of the middle Volga River region of Russia.
  The Mordvins comprise one of the more numerous indigenous peoples of Russia. They identify themselves as separate ethnic groups:
  Erzya
  Moksha
  Teryukhan
  Tengushev Mordvins who became fully Russified or Turkified during the 19th to 20th centuries
  Less than one third of Mordvins live in the autonomous republic of Mordovia; the rest are scattered over the Russian oblasts of Samara, Penza, Orenburg and Nizhny Novgorod, while others live in Tatarstan, Chuvashia, Bashkortostan, Central Asia, Siberia, the Russian Far East, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the United States.
  The Erzya Mordvins, who speak Erzya, and the Moksha Mordvins, who speak Moksha, are the two major groups. The Qaratay Mordvins live in the Kama Tamağı District of Tatarstan and speak a Tatar language - albeit with a large proportion of Mordvin vocabulary. The Teryukhan, living in the Nizhny Novgorod Oblast of Russia, switched to using Russian in the 19th century.
caption: Eastern Europe c. 9th century    Baltic Finns   Slavs    Mordvins   Khazars
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