Northwest Caucasian languages
The
Northwest Caucasian languages, also called
Pontic,
Abkhaz-Adyghe, or
Circassian, are a group of languages spoken in the
Caucasus region, chiefly in
Russia (
Adygea,
Kabardino-Balkaria,
Karachay-Cherkessia),
Georgia (
Abkhazia), and
Turkey, with smaller communities scattered throughout the
Middle East.
Phonetics
The entire family is characterised by a paucity of
phonemic vowels (two or three, depending upon the analysis) coupled with rich consonantal systems that include many forms of
secondary articulation. Ubykh (Ubyx), for example, had both the minimal number of vowels (two), and probably the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa.
Linguistic reconstructions suggest that both the richness of the consonantal systems and the poverty of the vocalic systems may be the result of a historical process, whereby vowel features such as
labialisation and
palatalisation were reassigned to adjacent consonants. For example, ancestral may have become and may have become , losing the old vowels */e/ and */o/ but gaining the new consonants and . The linguist
John Colarusso has further postulated that some instances of this may also be due to the levelling of an old
grammatical class prefix system (so may have become ), on the basis of pairs like Ubykh vs Kabardian and Abkhaz
heart.
Grammar
Northwest Caucasian languages have rather simple noun systems, manifesting only a handful of cases at the most, coupled with highly
agglutinative verbal systems so complex that virtually the entire syntactic structure of the sentence is contained within the verb. They do not generally permit more than one finite verb in a sentence, which precludes the existence of
subordinate clauses in the
Indo-European sense; equivalent functions are performed by extensive arrays of
nominal and
participial non-finite verb forms (although Abkhaz appears to be developing limited subordinate clauses, perhaps under the influence of Russian).
There are five recognized languages in the Northwest Caucasian family:
Abkhaz,
Abaza,
Kabardian or East Circassian,
Adyghe or West Circassian, and
Ubykh. They are classified as follows:
 |
Northwest_Caucasian_languages.png |
* Abkhaz-Abaza dialects
**
Abaza (45,000 speakers)
**
Abkhaz (Abxaz) (110,000)
* Circassian dialects (Cherkess)
**
Adyghe (Adyge) (500,000)
**
Kabardian (1,000,000)
*
Ubykh (Ubyx) (extinct)
Circassian dialect continuum
Circassian (or Cherkess) is a cover term for the series of dialects that include the literary languages of Adyghe and Kabardian.
Adyghe (Adyge)
The
Adyghe (Adyge, Adyg) language is one of the more widely spoken Northwest Caucasian languages. It has 500,000 speakers spread throughout
Russia and the
Middle East: 280,000 in
Turkey; 125,000 in Russia, where it is official in the Republic of
Adygea; 45,000 in
Jordan, 25,000 in
Syria, and 20,000 in
Iraq. There is even a small community in the
United States. Four main dialects are recognised:
Temirgoy,
Abdzakh,
Bzhedugh and
Shapsugh, as well as many minor ones such as the Turkish dialect
Hakuchi spoken by the last speakers of Ubykh. Adyghe has three phonemic vowels, and its consonants are less complex than the Abkhaz-Abaza dialects.
Kabardian
Kabardian has just over one million speakers: 550,000 in
Turkey and 450,000 in
Russia, where it is an official language of the republics of
Kabardino-Balkaria and
Karachay-Cherkessia. Kabardian has the least number of consonants of any North-Western Caucasian language, with 48, including some rather unusual
ejective fricatives and a small number of vowels. It has two major dialects, called Kabardian and Cherkess (Circassian); Kabardian itself has several dialects, including Terek, the literary standard, and Besney, which is intelligible with both Terek and
Adyghe.
Abkhaz-Abaza dialect continuum
Abkhaz (Abxaz) language
The
Abkhaz (Abxaz) language has 100,000 speakers in
Abkhazia (an autonomous entity within
Georgia), where it is the official language, and an unknown number of speakers in
Turkey. It has been a literary language from the beginning of the
20th century. Abkhaz and Abaza may be said to be dialects of the same language, but each preserves phonemes which the other has lost. Abkhaz is characterised by unusual consonant clusters and one of the world's smallest vowel inventories: It has only two distinctive vowels, an open vowel /a/ and a mid vowel /ə/. Next to
palatalized or
labialized consonants, /a/ is realized as [e] or [o], and /ə/ as [i] or [u]. There are three major
dialects:
Abzhuy and
Bzyp in
Georgia and
Sadz Turkey.
Abaza Language
The
Abaza language has some 45,000 speakers, 35,000 in
Russia and 10,000 in
Turkey. It is a literary language, but nowhere official. It shares with Abkhaz the distinction of having just two phonemic vowels. Abaza is phonologically more complex than Abkhaz, and is characterised by large consonant clusters, similar to those that can be found in
Georgian. There are three major dialects,
T'ap'anta,
Ashkar, and
Bezshagh. Some are partially intelligible with Abkhaz.
Ubykh (Ubyx) language
The
Ubykh (Ubyx) language is more closely related to Abkhaz and Abaza than to Adyghe and Kabardian. The population switched to speaking Adyghe, and Ubykh became extinct on
October 7,
1992, with the death of
Tevfik Esenç. A dialectal division within Ubykh was suspected by
Georges Dumézil, but the divergent form he described in
1965 was never investigated further. With eighty consonants, Ubykh has one of the largest inventories in the world, and probably the largest outside the
Khoisan languages. There are
pharyngealised consonants and a four-way place contrast among
sibilants. It was the only Northwest Caucasian language never to have a literary form.
A number of factors make the reconstruction of the Northwest Caucasian protolanguage problematic:
* most roots in Northwest Caucasian languages are monosyllabic, and many are single consonants;
* the
sound changes are often intricate, and a large number of consonants and sibilant contrasts provides further complexity;
*
ablaut was extensive and still plays some part in the modern languages;
*
borrowings between languages of the family were frequent;
* extensive
homophony occurs in the modern languages.
For these reasons, Proto-Northwest Caucasian is widely accepted as being one of the most difficult protolanguages to deal with, and it is therefore more difficult than most to relate to other families.
Connections to Hattic
Until about 1800 BC, the region of
Anatolia around ancient
Hattusa (modern
Boğazköy) that was later occupied by the
Hittites had been the home of an earlier people, conventionally called
Hattians, who spoke a poorly known non-
Indo-European language unrelated to
Hittite. This extinct
Hattic isolate appears to have some affinity with the Northwest Caucasian languages. The name
Hetto-Iberian has been proposed for a superfamily comprising Northwest Caucasian and Hattic.
Connections to Indo-European
It has been conjectured that the North-West Caucasian languages may be genetically related to the
Indo-European family, at a time depth of perhaps 12,000 years before the present. The hypothesised protolanguage is called
Proto-Pontic, but is not widely accepted.
There does at least appear to have been extensive contact between the two protolanguages, and the resemblances may be due to this influence.
North Caucasian family
Many linguists join the Northwest and
Northeast Caucasian languages into a
North Caucasian family, sometimes simply called
Caucasic or
Caucasian (in opposition to
Kartvelian (South Caucasian), which is thought to be unrelated, albeit heavily influenced by their northern neighbours). This hypothesis has perhaps been best illustrated by Sergei A. Starostin and Sergei Nikolayev, who present a set of phonological correspondences and shared morphological structure. However, there is no consensus that the relationship has been demonstrated, and many consider the correspondences to be spurious for the reasons mentioned above. See the article on
North Caucasian languages for details, as well as the external links below.
Higher-level connections
A few linguists have proposed even broader relationships, of which the
Dene-Caucasian hypothesis is perhaps the most popular.
Dene-Caucasian links the
North Caucasian (including
Northwest Caucasian),
Sino-Tibetan,
Burushaski and
Yeniseian (or
Karasuk), and
Na-Dene families. However, this is an even more tentative hypothesis than
Nostratic, which attempts to relate
Indoeuropean,
Uralic,
Kartvelian,
Altaic,
etc., and which is widely considered to be undemonstrated. See the article on the
languages of the Caucasus for more details.
*
CIA linguistic map of the Caucasus*
Atlas of the Caucasian Languages with detailed Language Guide (by Yuri B. Koryakov)* A Comparative Dictionary of North Caucasian Languages: Preface by Sergei Starostin & Sergein Nikolayev
**Part 1: foreword, abbreviations, bibliography:
PDF /
HTML**Part 2: Proto-North Caucasian consonantism:
PDF /
HTML**Part 3: PNC vocalism and root structure:
PDF /
HTML**Part 4: Proto-Nakh and Proto-Avaro-Andian:
PDF /
HTML**Part 5: Proto-Tsezian and Proto-Dargwa:
PDF /
HTML**Part 6: Proto-Lezgian and Khinalug:
PDF /
HTML**Part 7: Proto-West Caucasian:
PDF /
HTML*
North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary, by S. A. Starostin & S. Nikolayev
