Permic

Permic is the Uralic branch spoken west of the Ural Mountains, including Komi and Komi-Permyak in the Vychegda and upper Kama basins and Udmurt on the lower Kama and Vyatka. Like other Uralic tongues they are agglutinative with rich case systems, though they lack vowel harmony.

The name Perm comes from Perem in medieval Russian chronicles, first denoting the forest country and later its non-Russian inhabitants; the region was incorporated into the Russian state in the late fifteenth century.

In 1372 the missionary Stephen of Perm created the Old Permic alphabet, called Abur after its first two letters, blending Cyrillic and Greek forms with native Komi tamga marks. It wrote medieval Komi for the Permian church until the seventeenth century, when Cyrillic displaced it.