The
Erzya language is spoken by about 260,000 people in the northern and eastern and north-western parts of the Republic of
Mordovia and adjacent regions of Nizhniy Novgorod, Chuvashia, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in
Russia. A diaspora can also be found in
Armenia,
Estonia as well as in
Kazakhstan and other newly independent states of
Central Asia. Erzya is currently written using
Cyrillic with no modifications to the variant used by the Russian language. In Mordovia, Erzya is co-official with
Moksha and Russian.