The Language of the Besermians in the Light of the Historical Communication Processes of the Peoples of the Volga-Urals Region

Abstract

The article considers the linguistic aspects of the "Bessermian problem", the essence of which lies in the debatability of the question of the Bessermian ethnogenesis, namely about either the Turkic or Finno-Ugric origin of the Bessermian ethnos, whose history, unfolding during the last centuries on the territory of the Urals region, has no written sources and is little-studied. The interest to this problem stems from the studies of historical migrations of the peoples who constituted the population of Volga Bulgaria, a powerful state formation, which ceased to exist during the Mongol-Tatar conquests, and clarification of the historical fate of the people, recorded in a number of medieval sources under the designation "Beserm'en". In the connection with the attempts to verify the hypothesis, allowing to consider Bessermians as "direct descendants of the Kama Bulgars", the materials collected by the researchers of Bessermian language in the late 19th century, as well as in the 20th – early 21st centuries, were updated and subjected to the scientific-historical consideration, where the comparison of Bessermian dialect with Chuvash language, scientifically recognized as the only living language of Bulgar (or Oghur) group of the Turkish languages, was made. On the basis of the historiographical analysis the conclusion is made: despite the fact that at present Besermians are referred to small Finno-Ugrian groups, the question of their identification with the autochthonous Finno-Ugrian.