Languages of the Caucasus

thumb|upright=1.59|[[Ethnolinguistic groups in the Caucasus region (1995)]]

The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

Linguistic comparison allows the classification of these languages into several language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred to as part of a single language family. According to Asya Pereltsvaig, "grammatical differences between the three groups of languages are considerable. [...] These differences force the more conservative historical linguistics to treat the three language families of the Caucasus as unrelated."

Families indigenous to the Caucasus

Three of these families have no current indigenous members outside the Caucasus, and are considered indigenous to the area. The term Caucasian languages is generally restricted to these families, which are spoken by about 11.2 million people.

Kartvelian, also known as the South Caucasian or Iberian language family, with a total of about 4.3 million speakers. Includes Georgian, the official language of Georgia, with four million speakers, Svan with 14,000 speakers, Mingrelian with 345,000 speakers, and Laz with 22,000 speakers.
Northeast Caucasian, also called the Nakh-Daghestanian or Caspian family, with a total of about 4.3 million speakers. Includes Chechen with 1.7 million speakers, Avar with 1 million speakers, Dargwa with 590,000 speakers, Ingush with 500,000 speakers, and Lezgian with 800,000 speakers.
Northwest Caucasian, also called the Abkhazo-Adyghean, Circassian, or Pontic family, with a total of about 2 million speakers. Includes Kabardian, with one million speakers, Adyghe with 610,000 speakers, Abkhaz with 190,000 speakers, and Abaza with 85,000 speakers.

The Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families are notable for their high number of consonant phonemes (inventories range up to the 80–84 consonants of Ubykh). The consonant inventories of the South Caucasian languages, however, are not nearly as extensive, ranging from 28 (Georgian) to 32 (Svan) – comparable to languages like Russian (up to 37 consonant phonemes, depending on definition), Arabic (28 phonemes), and Western European languages (often more than 20 phonemes).

The autochthonous languages of the Caucasus share some areal features, such as the presence of ejective consonants and a highly agglutinative structure, and, with the sole exception of Mingrelian, all of them exhibit a greater or lesser degree of ergativity. Many of these features are shared with other languages that have been in the Caucasus for a long time, such as Ossetian (which has ejective sounds but no ergativity). The most promising proposals are connections between the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families and each other or with languages formerly spoken in Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia.

North Caucasian languages

Linguists such as Sergei Starostin see the Northeast (Nakh-Dagestanian) and Northwest (Abkhaz–Adyghe) families as related and propose uniting them in a single North Caucasian family, sometimes called Caucasic or simply Caucasian. This theory excludes the South Caucasian languages, thereby proposing two indigenous language families. While these two families share many similarities, their morphological structure, with many morphemes consisting of a single consonant, make comparison between them unusually difficult, and it has not been possible to establish a genetic relationship with any certainty. In the nineteenth century, it was considered that the best literary Arabic was spoken in the mountains of Dagestan.

Turkic

Several Turkic languages are spoken in the Caucasus. Of these, Azerbaijani is predominant, with around 9 million speakers in Azerbaijan and more than 10 million in North Western Iran. Other Turkic languages spoken include Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Nogai, Turkish, Turkmen and Urum.

Mongolic

Kalmyk Oirat, spoken by descendants of Oirat-speakers from East Asia, is a Mongolic language.

Vocabulary comparison

Below are selected basic vocabulary items for all three language families of the Caucasus.

:{| class="wikitable sortable"

! gloss !! Proto-NE Caucasian !! Proto-NW Caucasian !! Proto-Kartvelian

| eye || || ||

| tooth || || || GZ

| tongue || || ||

| hand, arm || || ||

| back (of body) || || ||

| heart || || ||

| meat || || || GZ

| sun || || ||

| moon || || ||

| earth || || (P-Circassian) ||

| water || || (P-Circassian) || GZ

| fire || || || GZ

| ashes || || ||

| road || || || GZ

| name || || ||

| kill || || ||

| burn || || ||

| know || || || , GZ

| black || || ||

| round || || || *grgw-

| dry || || ||

| thin || || || GZ

| what || || (P-Circassian) ||

| one || || || GZ

| five || || ||

References

External links

TITUS: Caucasian languages map by Jost Gippert & projects Armazi& Ecling
CIA ethnolinguistic map
language-family map by Matthew Dryer
Caucausian section of the Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire
The Iberian-Caucasian Connection in a Typological Perspective – An in-depth linguistic study of Basque, Georgian, and other ergative languages, concluding that the similarities are not strong enough to prove a genetic link.
Atlas of the Caucasian Languages with very detailed Language Guide (by Yuri B. Koryakov)
Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European by V. V. Ivanov
11. The comparative method in Caucasian linguistics by Wolfgang Schulze
The myth of the Caucasian Sprachbund: The case of ergativity by Kevin Tuite
The Rise and Fall and Revival of the Ibero-Caucasian Hypothesis by Kevin Tuite
Grammaticalization in the North Caucasian languages by Peter Arkadiev and Timur Maisak
Areal Typology of Proto‐Indo‐European: The Case for Caucasian Connections by Ranko Matasovic
The Northwest Caucasian languages by Peter Arkadiev and Yury Lander
Mountain of Tongues: The Languages of the Caucasus by J. C. Catford
“Mountain of Tongues” The Languages of the Caucasus in Arabic-Islamic Sources by Andrii Danylenko
Routledge Handbook of the Caucasus by John Colarusso
13 - The Caucasus from Part II - Case Studies for Areal Linguistics by Sven Grawunder
Ejectives, Altitude, and the Caucasus as a Linguistic Area by Thomas Wier
The languages of the Caucasus
Barriers That Are Steep and Linguistic by Ellen Barry
Caucasian Languages by Marina Chumakina
Parallel Evolution of Genes and Languages in the Caucasus Region
North Caucasian languages: comparison of three classification approaches by Valery Solovyev
The linguistic and genetic mosaic of the Northwest Caucasus by Asya Pereltsvaig
Languages of the World: Ibero-Caucasian and Pidgin-Creole Fascicle One by C. F. Voegelin and F. M. Voegelin on JSTOR
A Case of Taboo-Motivated Lexical Replacement in the Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus by Kevin Tuite and Wolfgang Schulze on JSTOR
Mountain of Tongues: The Languages of the Caucasus by J. C. Catford on JSTOR
Languages of the World: Ibero-Caucasian and Pidgin-Creole Fascicle One by C. F. Voegelin and F. M. Voegelin
A case of taboo-motivated lexical replacement in the indigenous languages of the Caucasus by Kevin Tuite and Wolfgang Schulze on ResearchGate
From North to North West: How North-West Caucasian Evolved from North Caucasian by Viacheslav Chirikba
2. The problem of the Caucasian Sprachbund by Viacheslav Chirikba
Overview of Caucasian languages and Caucasus
Caucasian Language Families
The Caucasians - Cradle of Civilization
Northwest Caucasian Languages and Hattic on Dergi Park
BASQUE AND CAUCASIAN: A SURVEY OF THE METHODS USED IN ESTABLISHING ANCIENT GENETIC AFFILIATIONS on repository by the University of Arizona
The History of Basque
Endangered Languages of the Caucasus and Beyond on IIAS
The Pan-Caucasian alphabet by Vazgen R. Ghazaryan at Omniglot