The total number of speakers is around 950,000, of which around 550,000 speak the most widely spoken language, Udmurt.

[5] The word was initially used to designate certain territories, including the lower reaches of the Dvina River, as well as the area bounded by the Pechora, Vychegda and Kama rivers in the north, west and south, and the Urals in the east, which was incorporated into the Russian state in the late 15th century.

[5] Proto-Uralic word roots have been subject to particularly heavy reduction in the Permic languages.

The reconstruction of Proto-Permic vocalism and its development from Proto-Uralic has always been a puzzling topic, for which there are several models.

There is general agreement on the existence of two series of close vowels, one of which results in modern /i ɯ u/ in literary Udmurt and literary Komi-Zyryan, the other in correspondences of Udmurt /e ɯ u/ to Komi /e ə o/ (but /i ʉ u/ in the Komi-Yazva language).

Proposed distinguishing factors for these include length (*u, *uː), tenseness (*ʊ, *u) and height (*u, *o).