The Udmurt language belongs together with Komi and Komi-Permiatskii to the Permian languages of the Finno-Ugrian group of the Uralic family of languages. The Udmurt, Komi and Komi-Permiatskii peoples, who live in or near the Ural Mountains and together number over a million, share 80% of their vocabulary and much of their grammar. The Finno-Ugrian group also includes Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Mari, Mordovian, Khanti and several other languages.

Characteristic traits of the Udmurt language are:

• the presence of the special possessive inflection of nouns, which indicates to whom or to what the noun belongs (in Udmurt, out of all the Finno-Ugrian languages, this category is most fully developed, and is very useful for describing relationships);
• the stress falling on the last syllable, with few exceptions;
• the absence of the grammatical category of gender, even with third person singular pronouns;
• consonant clusters usually occur only in the middle of words (between syllables);
• noun clusters or chains appear frequently, similar to English; - the verb is usually placed at the end of a sentence;
• the formation of words by means of affixes; and
• the use of postpositions instead of prepositions.

Upon examination, you will notice that Udmurt is a highly relational language. As information science has recently shown, a data item has little meaning in itself, and aquires much more meaning as it comes into relationship with other items. In Udmurt, the 15 grammatical cases plus the special possessive inflections of nouns and pronouns cause them to be "active," much like verbs, having first, second and third person, and singular and plural inflections for both possessor and possessed. This shows the relationship of a person or persons, a thing or things to another or to others. The grammatical cases also show the relationship, distance or action of one thing to another: actor or acted upon, owned by, issuing forth from, recipient of action, created or used by, located at, starting from, moving along, moving toward, terminating at, being absent, and being done according to, etc.

In conjunction with this, verbs are very "productive," generating many different forms of deverbal nouns and participles. Do not be concerned that Udmurt grammar might seem complex and formidable: the grammatical cases for nouns and pronouns and production of deverbals and participles from verbs are very regular in their forms, having few exceptions. They are far less difficult than the myriads of phrases one has to learn in English and all of its exceptions to rules, or the many different paradigms within the grammatical cases of Russian, both of which serve the purpose of expressing special relationships.

All of this is accomplished in Udmurt by means of affixes that are appended to the root or stem of a word, whether verb or noun. This makes Udmurt an "agglunative" language, along with the other Finno-Ugrian languages. In most Udmurt sentences you will find at least one word with three or four affixes, and it is not too unusual to find a word with five or six affixes. After removing all affixes, it is hard to determine which in fact is the true word stem: verb or noun, doing or being; which idea is primary in Udmurt: action or substance, energy or matter.

In addition, whereas in English we use the suffix -in-law to indicate anyone related by marriage to one s immediate family, Udmurt vocabulary has even more terms than in Russian for family relationships. Elder sister is one word, younger sister is another. Elder brother is one word, younger brother is another. Uncle on one s mother s side is a different word than on one s father s side. There is no one word for grandchild, instead there are 24 different words to show father s-son s-son, mother s-daughter s-son, father s-son s-daughter, parents -daughter s- daughter, parent s-son s-children, etc. The term shows the exact relationship, and whether singular or plural for possessor (grandparent¦s) and possessed (child¦ren).

All of this in Udmurt resembles a highly sophisticated relational database programming language in its regularity and use of affixes to define relationships of one data item to another. One deverbal affix, ÏÎ, can produce a noun with a fine shade of meaning, and another affix, ÜÍ/ÅÍ, a slightly different meaning, both forms having only one word to express the meaning in English or Russian. One has to use several words to translate precisely the desired shade of meaning. And what Udmurt may borrow from other languages in terms of technological vocabulary or construct by combining words together with a hyphen is made up for by the precision of meaning being conveyed by a tiny affix of only two or three letters. Often an Udmurt sentence of just three or four words requires eight to twelve words to translate into English or Russian.