Mansi

Mansi is a Uralic language, a member of the Ob-Ugric family of the Ugric group of languages. It has 25,500 speakers and is an official language of the Union of Khantyland and Mansiland, a member republic of Russia. It has four major dialects: Sosva, Tavda, Lozva and Konda. Sosva Mansi, with a total of 21,000 speakers, is by far the largest by number of speakers, and is the basis for the standard language that is used in print, radio and newspapers. The Konda dialect has 4,000 speakers. There are less than 500 speakers of the Lozva dialect, with no children speakers, as the community assimilates into the Sosva-speaking majority. Tavda Mansi has been extinct since the 1950s. Native speakers seldom speak the standard language, but all understand it, and it is this which is taught in schools and to students of Mansi as a foreign language. Intelligibilty between geographically distant dialects is difficult.