Volga Finns

The Volga Finns (sometimes referred to as Eastern Finns) are a historical group of indigenous peoples of Russia whose descendants include the Mari people, the Erzya and the Moksha Mordvins, as well as extinct Merya, Muromian and Meshchera people. The Permians are sometimes also grouped as Volga Finns.

The modern representatives of Volga Finns live in the basins of the Sura and Moksha rivers, as well as (in smaller numbers) in the interfluve between the Volga and the Belaya rivers. The Mari language has two dialects, the Meadow Mari and the Hill Mari.

Traditionally the Mari and the Mordvinic languages (Erzya and Moksha) were considered to form a Volga-Finnic or Volgaic group within the Finno-Permic branch of the Uralic language family, accepted by linguists like Robert Austerlitz (1968), Aurélien Sauvageot & Karl Heinrich Menges (1973), Harald Haarmann (1974) and Charles Frederick Voegelin & Florence Marie Voegelin (1977), but rejected by others like Björn Collinder (1965) and Robert Thomas Harms (1974). This grouping has also been criticized by Salminen (2002), who suggests it may be simply a geographic, not a phylogenetic, group. Since 2009 the 16th edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the World has adopted a classification grouping Mari and Mordvin languages as separate branches of the Uralic language family.

Mariah Carey

Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1969 or 1970) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. She rose to prominence after the release of the first single taken from her eponymous debut album in 1990, "Vision of Love". More than two decades later, Rolling Stone defined the song as an influence on "virtually every other female R&B singer since the nineties". Mariah Carey produced four chart-topping singles in the US and began what would become a string of commercially successful albums which solidified the singer as Columbia's highest selling act. Carey and Boyz II Men spent a record sixteen weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 with "One Sweet Day", which remains the longest-running number-one song in US chart history. Following a contemptuous divorce from Sony Music head Tommy Mottola, Carey adopted a new image and traversed towards R&B with the release of Butterfly (1997). In 1998, she was honored as the world's best-selling recording artist of the 1990s at the World Music Awards and subsequently named the best-selling female artist of the millennium in 2000.

Noor Jehan

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Noor Jehan, (Urdu: نور جہاں‎, born Allah Rakhi Wasai; 21 September 1926 – 23 December 2000) better known by her honorific title Malika-e-Tarannum, (Urdu: ملکہ ترنم‎), was a Pakistani singer and actress who worked first in British India and then in Pakistan. Her career spanned seven decades (1930s–1990s). In the Indian subcontinent she was renowned as one of the greatest and most influential singers of all times and was given the honorific title of Malika-e-Tarannum, (the queen of melody) in Pakistan.

Born into a family with music traditions, Noor Jehan was pushed by her parents to follow in their musical footsteps and become a singer but she was more interested in acting in films. She recorded about 10,000 songs in various languages of India and Pakistan including Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Sindhi. Along with Ahmed Rushdi, she holds the record for having given voice to the largest number of film songs in the history of Pakistani cinema. She is also considered to be the first female Pakistani film director.