מארי הררית

Hill Mari (кырык мары kyryk mary) is a Volga-Finnic Uralic language spoken on the high right bank of the Volga in Russia's Mari El Republic by ~30K people. It is officially distinct from Meadow Mari (mhr, ~400K speakers) — both are co-official republican languages alongside Russian — though they form a dialect continuum and are partly mutually intelligible. The Mari are one of the few Volga peoples to retain pre-Christian indigenous animist religion (Chimari Yula). Hill Mari has its own Cyrillic orthography distinguished by additional letters Ӓ ӓ, Ӧ ӧ, Ӱ ӱ and Ы̆ ы̆.