The Erzya language (эрзянь кель, eŕźań keĺ, pronounced [ˈerʲzʲanʲ ˈkʲelʲ]), also Erzian or historically Arisa, is spoken by approximately 300,000 people in the northern, eastern and north-western parts of the Republic of Mordovia and adjacent regions of Nizhny Novgorod, Chuvashia, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in Russia.

Erzya is a language that is closely related to Moksha but has distinct phonetics, morphology and vocabulary.

Non-palatalized /t/, /d/, /n/ in a front vowel environment are limited to recent Russian loans such as кит /kit/ 'whale'.

[6] The front vowels /i/ and /e/ have centralized variants [ï] and [ë] immediately following a plain alveolar consonant, e.g. siń [sïnʲ] "they", seń [sënʲ] "blue".

Likewise, if a front-vowel stem is followed by a low back vowel suffix, subsequent syllables will contain back harmony: велеванзо (veĺevanzo) "throughout its villages" Thus the seeming violations of vowel harmony attested in stems, e.g. узере (uźere) "axe", суре (suŕe) "thread (string)", are actually due to the palatalized consonants /zʲ/ and /rʲ/.

Erzya distinguishes twelve cases (here illustrated with the noun мода moda "ground, earth").

Erzya verbs are inflected for tense and mood, and are further conjugated for person of subject and object.

In combination with the alveolar consonants т, д, ц, с, з, н, л, and р, vowel letters are employed to distinguish between plain and palatalized articulations in a similar way as in Russian: а, э, ы, о, у follow plain alveolars, while я, е, и, ё, ю follow palatalized alveolars, e.g. та /ta/, тэ /te/, ты /ti/, то /to/, ту /tu/ vs. тя /tʲa/, те /tʲe/, ти /tʲi/, тё /tʲo/, тю /tʲu/.

Following non-alveolar consonants, only а, е, и, о, у occur, e.g. па /pa/, пе /pe/, пи /pi/, по /po/, пу /pu/.