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Peoples of Russia
Mountain Mari
The Mountain Mari are an ethnolinguistic group of the Mari.
Language
The Mari language, which belongs to the Volga-Finnish group of the Finno-Ugric languages, includes the Mountain, Meadow, Eastern and Northwestern dialects. The use of the Russian language is also common. The writing system was created based on the Cyrillic script.
Ethnic groups
The Mari include three main groups: the Mountain Mari (the right bank of the Volga river), the Meadow Mari (the Vetluga-Vyatka interstream) and the Eastern Mari (Bashkiria and other territories to the east of Vyatka to which they moved in the 16th-18th centuries).
Dispersion
The majority of the Mari (312.2 thousand people) live in the Republic of Mariy El; 105.8 thousand (Meadow Eastern Mari) in the Republic of Bashkortostan (in the northern and western parts of the Republic, the majority in four regions: Birsk, Krasnokamsk, Kaltasy and Mishkino). There are many Mari people in the Kirovsk (39 thousand) and Sverdlovsk (28 thousand) regions, Tatarstan (18.8 thousand), Udmurtia (9 thousand), Nizhegorodsky region (7.8 thousand), Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District (7.3 thousand), Volgograd region (6 thousand), Perm territory (5.4 thousand).
