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The Meryans () or Merya people () were an ancient Finnic peoples that lived in the Upper Volga region.Меря // Отечественная история. История России с древнейших времен до 1917 года: Энциклопедия / Глав. ред. Valentin Yanin. — М.: Большая российская энциклопедия, 2000. — Т. 3. К—М. — С. 559—560. Субстратная топонимия русского Севера и мерянская проблема // Вопросы языкознания. — 1996. — № 1. — С. 3—23. The Primary Chronicle places them around the Lake Nero and Pleshcheyevo lakes. They were assimilated by the Russians by the 17th century, but there has been a modern revival of Meryan culture and language, termed .
Merya began to be assimilated by East Slavs when their territory became incorporated into Kievan Rus' in the 10th century. The Life of Abraham of Galich claims that, when arriving to the Lake Galich in the 14th century, he found there some "pagan people called Merya".
The Meryans were an important part of the development of the Russian nation. The sites of Sarskoye Gorodishche near Lake Nero and island Nero and Kleshchin near Lake Pleshcheyevo were formerly proposed as Meryan "capitals", although this notion has been largely abandoned. A large boulder supposedly venerated by the Merya survives near Kleshchin (see Blue Stone).
Based on Toponymy, onomastics and words in Russian dialects some people have tried to reconstruct the key features of the Meryan language. The first reconstructions were done in 1985 by O. B. Tkachenko. The latest book about Merya reconstructions was published in 2019.”Allikas: Ткаченко О. Б., Мерянский язык, Kiova 1985.”
The Meryans are thought to have been closely connected with the Muroma people (whose language has even been suggested to have been a dialect of Meryan).SOUTH-EASTERN CONTACT AREA OF FINNIC LANGUAGES IN THE LIGHT OF ONOMASTICS (helsinki.fi) Rahkonen claims that the eastern Volkhov Chudes were very close to Meryans, culturally and linguistically.Rahkonen 2011: 255.
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