Languages of the Caucasus

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

Linguistic comparison enables the family of these languages into several different language families, with little or no discernible affinity to regarded and sent separately. other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly indicated to as a family of languages. 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 Linguistic communication families of the Caucasus as unrelated."

Families indigenous to the Caucasus

Three of these families clear 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.[]

It is commonly believed that any Caucasian languages develope many consonants. While this is certainly true for nearly members of the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families inventories range up to the 80–84 consonants of Ubykh, the consonant inventories of the South Caucasian languages are not almost as extensive, ranging from 28 Georgian to 30 Laz – 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 attribute are shared with other languages that have been in the Caucasus for a long time, such(a) as Ossetian which has ejective sounds but no ergativity.

Since the birth of comparative linguistics in the 19th century, scholars have attempted to relate them to each other or to languages external the Caucasus region. The most promising proposals are connections between the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families and used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other or with languages formerly spoken in Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia.

Linguists such as Sergei Starostin see the Northeast Nakh-Dagestanian and Northwest Abkhaz–Adyghe families as related anduniting them in a single North Caucasian family, sometimes called Caucasic or simply Caucasian. This picture 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 defining a genetic relationship with any certainty.

There are no asked affinities between the South Caucasian and North Caucasian families. Nevertheless, some scholars have portrayed the single name Ibero-Caucasian for all the Caucasian language families, North and South, in an effort to unify the Caucasian languages under one family.

Some linguists have claimed affinities between the Northwest Caucasian Circassian brand and the extinct Hattic language of central Anatolia. See the article on Northwest Caucasian languages for details.

Alarodian is a reported connection between Northeast Caucasian and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages of Anatolia.

Linguists such as Sergei Starostin have proposed a Dené–Caucasian macrofamily, which includes the North Caucasian languages together with Basque, Burushaski, Na-Dené, Sino-Tibetan, and Yeniseian. This proposal is rejected by most linguists.