Chechen language
The
Chechen language has about 1,200,000 speakers, most of whom live in
Chechnya.
The Chechen language is one of the
languages of the Caucasus. Linguistically, it is a member of the
Nakh family, together with
Ingush and
Bats; they all belong to the
Northeast Caucasian languages with only Ingush and Chechen being mutually intelligible.
Languages indigenous to the Caucasus are not members of any language families spoken elsewhere in the world.
Chechen is spoken by about 950,000, in Chechnya and (due to the
Chechen diaspora)
Middle East countries, especially
Jordan.
Official status
Chechen is an official language of
Chechnya, an
autonomous republic of
Russia.
Dialects
There are a number of Chechen dialects:
*
Ploskost*
Itumkala (Shatoi)*
Melkhin*
Kistin*
Cheberloi*
Akkin (Aux)Some characteristics of Chechen include its wealth of consonants and sounds similar to
Arabic or
Native American languages, a large vowel system resembling
Swedish or
German, four
grammatical genders, and a complex
phrase structure.
The Chechen language has (like most indigenous languages of the Caucasus) a large number of consonants: about 31 (depending on the dialect and the analysis), more than for most languages of Europe. Unlike most other languages of the Caucasus, it also has an extensive inventory of vowels and diphthongs: about 27 (depending on dialect and analysis), similar in number and phonetics to the vowel systems of the
Scandinavian languages, German, and
Finnish. None of the spelling systems used for Chechen so far have distinguished the vowels with complete accuracy.
Chechen also presents interesting challenges for lexicography, as creating new words in the language relies on fixation of whole phrases rather than adding to the end of existing words or combining existing words. It can be difficult to decide which phrases belong in the dictionary.
Native Chechen words are few in number (not more than 3000). There are many borrowings from
Russian, Turkic languages (mostly from
Kumyk),
Arabic, as well as some from
Persian,
Alanian (
Ossetic), and
Georgian. Chechen and
Ingush scholars have found links to the ancient
cuneiform languages
Hurrian and
Urartian.
The Chechen literary language was created after the
October Revolution, and the
Latin alphabet began to be used instead of Arabic for Chechen writing in the mid-
1920s. In
1938, the
Cyrillic alphabet was adopted. With the declaration of the Chechen republic in
1992, some Chechen speakers returned to the Latin alphabet. The Chechen diaspora in
Jordan,
Turkey and
Syria is fluent but generally not literate in Chechen except for individuals who have made efforts to learn the writing system, and of course the Cyrillic alphabet is not generally known in these countries.
*
Ethnologue report for Chechen*
Rosetta Project entry for Chechen (includes word list)*
Indigenous Language of the Caucasus (Chechen), grammatical sketch of Chechen language*
The Cyrillic and Latin Chechen alphabets*
The Chechen language | Noxchiin mott Wealth of linguistic information.
