108 4 Udmurt on Social Network Sites: A Comparison with the Welsh Case Christian Pischlöger No noise, no improvement. Activism as such is not sufficient for improvement, but damned if it isn t necessary Todd Gitlin, 2003. Cited from Combs and Penfield, 2012: 461 I don t speak proper Welsh Crystal, 2006: 10 Only foreigners speak pure Udmurt A 22-year-old male interviewee in A. Zamyatin, 2012: 25 Despite the fact that the Udmurt language is, besides Russian, an official language of the Udmurt Republic in Russia and one of the bigger languages of the Uralic language family, the language is  definitely endangered according to UNESCO. The reasons for this are manifold: urbanisation, influence of mass media, increased mobility, weak institutional support, low prestige, etc. In recent years, predominantly urban language activists have been using social media to promote the use of Udmurt and to create an Udmurt identity in a modern environment. The colloquial tone in Udmurt groups on social network sites (SNS) like Vkontakte fosters the use of mixed language forms ( суро пожо), otherwise frowned upon by adherents to language purism. The role of SNS in maintaining and revitalising languages is often believed to be of considerable importance, but is still poorly investigated. Research has been carried out on, e.g. the Welsh language. Compared with the apparently normalised and widespread presence of Welsh on the internet, Udmurt on social media is still very much characterised by language activism. One possible explanation for this might be an earlier adoption of SNS by