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89-432: The Northwest Caucasian languages , also called West Caucasian , Abkhazo-Adyghean , Abkhazo-Circassian , Circassic , or sometimes Pontic languages , is a family of languages spoken in the northwestern Caucasus region, chiefly in three Russian republics ( Adygea , Kabardino-Balkaria , Karachay–Cherkessia ), the disputed territory of Abkhazia , Georgia , and Turkey , with smaller communities scattered throughout
178-474: A Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family. Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates , essentially language families consisting of
267-603: A common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European . A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Inversely, there is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages , contain over 1000. Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound changes are one of
356-477: A handful of cases at the most, coupled with highly agglutinative verbal systems that can contain almost the entire syntactic structure of the sentence. All finite verbs are marked for agreement with three arguments: absolutive , ergative , and indirect object , and there are also a wide range of applicative constructions . There is a split between "dynamic" and "stative" verbs , with dynamic verbs having an especially complex morphology. A verb's morphemes indicate
445-509: A lack of vowel distinctions, often providing archetypical cases of vertical vowel systems , also known as "linear" vowel systems. 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 labialization and palatalization were reassigned to adjacent consonants. For example, ancestral */ki/ may have become /kʲə/ and */ku/ may have become /kʷə/ , losing
534-509: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic , Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. The concept of language families
623-630: 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 Abkhazia and Sadz in Turkey. Abaza 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
712-426: A number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known. Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for
801-643: A number of ways, including compounding , affixation, reduplication or conversion from another part of speech. Roughly equivalent to the infinitive, or to a so-called "verbal noun," the Masdar form of the verb resembles the English gerund. It is formed by the addition of a specific suffix to a bare verb stem, -ра ( -ra ) for a dynamic verb and -заара ( -zaara ) for a stative. аԥхьара á-px’a-ra ART -read- MSD аԥхьара á-px’a-ra ART-read-MSD "to read/be reading" Various prefixes can be added to
890-427: A single language and have no single ancestor. Isolates are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family — a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque , which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On
979-512: A single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family , for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within
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#17327651793631068-462: A single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque . In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship
1157-800: Is a cover term for the series of dialects that include the literary languages of Adyghe and Kabardian. Adyghe 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 , 20,000 in Iraq , and 4,000 in Israel . There
1246-487: Is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent . Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with
1335-483: Is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language. The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods. Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take
1424-509: Is also spoken as a minority language around the world. There is a considerable number of Abkhaz speakers in Adjara in southern Georgia, with the diaspora concentrating itself around the capital Batumi , with about 982 people considering Abkhaz their first language. In the Russian census of 2010, 6,786 speakers of Abkhaz were reported in Russia . In Ukraine there are around 1,458 according to
1513-467: Is an agglutinative language that relies heavily on affixation. It has an ergative-absolutive typology, such that the subject of an intransitive verb functions identically to the object of a transitive verb. Notably, Abkhaz expresses ergativity entirely through the ordering of subjects and objects within verb constructions rather than through overt case marking as most other ergative languages do. All Latin transliterations in this section utilize
1602-452: Is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language , spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In
1691-422: Is an even more tentative hypothesis than Nostratic , which attempts to relate Kartvelian , Indo-European , Uralic , and Altaic , etc., and which is widely considered to be undemonstrated. Language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with
1780-543: Is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects , which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed. It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer . Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact , which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages . In addition,
1869-477: Is even a small community in the United States . Four main dialects are recognised: Temirgoy , Abadzekh , Shapsugh and Bzhedugh , as well as many minor ones such as Hakuchi spoken by the last speakers of Ubykh in Turkey. Adyghe has many consonants: between 50 and 60 consonants in the various Adyghe dialects but it has only three phonemic vowels. Its consonants and consonant clusters are less complex than
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#17327651793631958-533: Is found with any other known language. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier . For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language
2047-419: Is highly regular. Abkhaz, being an ergative language, makes a strong distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs, as well as dynamic and stative . Stative verbs describe states of being, roughly analogous to copular phrases in English, as in дхәыҷуп ( d-x˚əčә́-wə-p - "she is a child"). Dynamic verbs express direct actions, functioning more closely to standard English verbs. Dynamic verbs possess
2136-576: Is no consensus that the relationship has been demonstrated. (See the article on North Caucasian languages for details, as well as the external links below). 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), Basque , Burushaski , Yeniseian , Sino-Tibetan , and Na–Dene families. However, this
2225-637: Is not a measure of) a genetic relationship between the languages concerned. Linguistic interference can occur between languages that are genetically closely related, between languages that are distantly related (like English and French, which are distantly related Indo-European languages ) and between languages that have no genetic relationship. Some exceptions to the simple genetic relationship model of languages include language isolates and mixed , pidgin and creole languages . Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from
2314-451: Is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing. A common visual representation of a language family is given by a genetic language tree. The tree model is sometimes termed a dendrogram or phylogeny . The family tree shows the relationship of the languages within a family, much as a family tree of an individual shows their relationship with their relatives. There are criticisms to
2403-539: Is not clear. The Turkish census denotes 13,951, but the figures are dubious, since the numbers of Abkhazians that came from the beginning of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th have been documented at around 30 thousand. Ethnologue gives 150,000 Abkhazians living in Turkey, of these 50,000 still speak the language. The head of the Abkhaz federation says there are in between 500 and 700 thousand Abkhazians in Turkey. In general, Abkhaz seems to have been lost by most of
2492-464: Is phonologically more complex than Abkhaz, and is characterised by large consonant clusters, similar to those that can be found in Georgian . There are two major dialects, Tapant and Ashkhar . Some are partially intelligible with Abkhaz. Ubykh forms a third branch, with parallels to both Adyghe and Abkhaz. The population switched to speaking Adyghe, and Ubykh became extinct on 7 October 1992, with
2581-422: Is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method , a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher . This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families . For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Indo-European
2670-521: Is the day of the Abkhazian language in Georgia . Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language and is thus related to Adyghe . The language of Abkhaz is especially close to Abaza , and they are sometimes considered dialects of the same language, Abazgi , of which the literary dialects of Abkhaz and Abaza are simply two ends of a dialect continuum . Grammatically, the two are very similar; however,
2759-428: 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
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2848-432: Is usually represented as [ɨ] if the vowel is in a stressed position, and being unaffected by its neighbouring consonants. Other linguists however, mainly Russian ones, describe the vowels differently. They describe the sound of 'ә' being completely different from [ɨ], and by their descriptions being closer to [ə]. The 'а' is described as being particularly back, likely [ɑ]. Typical of Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz
2937-664: The Indo-European sense. Equivalent functions are performed by extensive arrays of nominal and participial non-finite verb forms, though Abkhaz appears to be developing limited subordinate clauses, perhaps under the influence of Russian. Percentage of total Northwest Caucasian speakers, by language 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: Circassian (Cherkess)
3026-413: The Middle East . The group's relationship to any other language family is uncertain and unproven. One language, Ubykh , became extinct in 1992, while all of the other languages are in some form of endangerment, with UNESCO classifying all as either "vulnerable", "endangered", or "severely endangered". The Northwest Caucasian languages possess highly complex sets of consonant distinctions paired with
3115-465: The North Germanic language family, including Danish , Swedish , Norwegian and Icelandic , which have shared descent from Ancient Norse . Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants. In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance,
3204-489: The comparative method of linguistic analysis. In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be cognates : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out
3293-401: The tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy . Linguists thus describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related . The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of
3382-661: The 2001 census, but of these only 317 speak Abkhazian. There were also communities in Syria , Jordan and Iraq with around 5,000 Abkhazians, although this number could reach 10,000 according to the Abkhazia's Foreign Ministry. The biggest western diaspora is in Germany , with around 5,000 speakers, but other communities are found in countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Austria, France, Belgium and so on. The earliest indisputable extant written records of
3471-468: The 4 kinds of labialisation described by Chirikba. Affricate The nature of the vowels of Abkhaz is not clear. Some linguists, characterise the vowel system as a 2 degree vertical vowel system ; with the two vowels being distinguished by height, 'ә' being the high/close vowel, and 'а' being the low/open. This system would very closely resemble the one found in Adyghe . The quality of 'ә' in this case,
3560-643: The Abkhaz language are in the Arabic script , recorded by the Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi in the 17th century. Abkhaz has been used as a literary language for only about 100 years. It was suggested that certain inscriptions on Ancient Greek pottery which had been considered nonsense are in fact written in Abkhaz-Adydge languages. The methodology of the research was criticised and the results called improbable. In 1918, Tbilisi State University became
3649-503: The Abkhaz–Abaza dialects. 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 fewest consonants of any North-Western Caucasian language, with 48, including some rather unusual ejective fricatives and a small number of vowels. Kabardian itself has several dialects, including Terek,
Northwest Caucasian languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
3738-472: The Masdar to form entire dependent clauses, as in аԥибаҽра a-pә́-j+ba-č-ra ART - PREV - RECI -break- MSD аԥибаҽра a-pә́-j+ba-č-ra ART-PREV-RECI-break-MSD "breaking each other" However, the fully conjugated personal Abkhaz verb forms are "templatic," with each grammatical distinction occupying a specific "slot" or "position" within the broader verb template. Verbs are thus formed by
3827-477: 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. This hypothesised proto-language is called Proto-Pontic , but is not widely accepted. There does at least appear to have been extensive contact between the two proto-languages, and the resemblances may be due to this influence. Many linguists join
3916-683: The Northwest Caucasian (Circassian) family and the extinct Hattic language . Hattic was spoken in Anatolia ( Turkey ), in the area around ancient Hattusa (modern Boğazköy ), until about 1800 BCE, when it was replaced by the Indo-European Hittite language . The name Hetto-Iberian (or Proto-Iberian ) was proposed by Georgian historian Simon Janashia for a superfamily comprising the North and South Caucasian languages, Hattic and other languages of ancient Anatolia . (The "Iberian" in
4005-516: The Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages into a North Caucasian family, sometimes simply called Kavkazian (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
4094-568: The Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family , since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European ; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of
4183-614: The Sakarya province, it being spoken in 14 villages. The other major place where Abkhaz is spoken is in Karachay-Cherkessia , where the Northern dialects are spoken, although there they are considered as a separate language and form the literary Abaza language . They are spoken by 37,831 people in Russia, mostly in the south of Stavropol Krai in the area around Kislovodsk , and in the upper Kuma river area. Abkhaz
4272-522: The addition of various affixes to the verb stem; these affixes express such distinctions as transitivity, person and stative/dynamic quality, occupying rigid positions within the overall verb structure. There is a high degree of agreement between verbs and other parts of speech. Overall, the Abkhaz verb is constructed as follows: Not all of these elements will necessarily co-occur in every verb. The individual parts of verb morphology are addressed below. First Position The first prefixing element of
4361-493: The closest relative to Abkhaz, with it only later on being influenced by Circassian. There is not an agreed number of speakers of Abkhaz, and there are widely different numbers. It is agreed that today most of the Abkhaz people do not live in Abkhazia. In the census conducted by the Republic of Abkhazia in 2011, Abkhazians comprised 50.8% of the population, around 122,175 people; of these 92,838 speaking it natively. Only two of
4450-496: The common ancestor of the Germanic subfamily, was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European , the common ancestor of the Indo-European family. Within a large family, subfamilies can be identified through "shared innovations": members of a subfamily will share features that represent retentions from their more recent common ancestor, but were not present in the overall proto-language of the larger family. Some taxonomists restrict
4539-545: 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-one consonants, Ubykh had perhaps the largest inventory in the world aside from the Kx'a and Tuu families of southern Africa with their extensive system of clicks . There are pharyngealised consonants and a four-way place contrast among sibilants . It
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#17327651793634628-488: The descendants, and bilingualism being low except in some specific areas, although there seems to be an effort for the new generation to learn the language with public schools being able to teach Abkhaz and together with 7,836 second language speakers. Abkhazian villages are concentrated around the cities of Adapazarı , Düzce , Sinop , Hendek and Samsun in the northern part, and in the west around cities such as Bilecik , Inegöl and Eskişehir ; they are mainly found in
4717-565: The development of labiovelars in Proto-Indo-European , which once neighboured Proto-NWC . 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 two vowels and probably the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa . Northwest Caucasian languages have rather simple noun systems, with only
4806-493: The differences in phonology are substantial, it also contains elements characteristic of Kabardian ; these are the main reasons for many others to prefer keeping the two separate, while others still refer to it as the Tapanta dialect of Abkhaz. Chirikba mentions that there are possible indications that proto-Northwest Caucasian , could have divided firstly into proto-Circassian and to proto-Ubykh-Abkhaz; Ubykh then being
4895-563: The family tree model. Critics focus mainly on the claim that the internal structure of the trees is subject to variation based on the criteria of classification. Even among those who support the family tree model, there are debates over which languages should be included in a language family. For example, within the dubious Altaic language family , there are debates over whether the Japonic and Koreanic languages should be included or not. The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to
4984-415: The family. The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population. Two languages have a genetic relationship , and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change , or one is descended from
5073-415: The family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade . Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, sometimes referred to as "branches" or "subfamilies" of the family; for instance, the Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family. Subfamilies share a more recent common ancestor than the common ancestor of the larger family; Proto-Germanic ,
5162-484: The first institution of higher education to teach Abkhazian language. The founders of the university began to take care of the development and scientific study of the Abkhazian language. At the meeting of the Council of Professors held at Tbilisi State University in 1918, Ivane Javakhishvili noted the scientific importance of studying Caucasian languages. In 1918, by the decision of the Council of Professors, Petre Charaia
5251-495: The following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world: Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages , pidgins , and unclassifiable languages ): Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in
5340-416: The form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic , the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as
5429-479: The full range of aspect , mood and tense forms, in contrast to statives, which do not. Some verbs, called inversives, combine certain features of both stative and dynamic verbs. Another important verbal distinction in Abkhaz is finite versus non-finite, referring to the duration of the action . Finite verbs usually contain enough information to form a complete sentence, whereas non-finite verbs typically form dependent clauses . Verb stems can be derived in
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#17327651793635518-503: The global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates. One controversial theory concerning the genetic relationships among languages is monogenesis , the idea that all known languages, with the exceptions of creoles , pidgins and sign languages , are descendant from a single ancestral language. If that is true, it would mean all languages (other than pidgins, creoles, and sign languages) are genetically related, but in many cases,
5607-542: The language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages ( Latin , Oscan , Umbrian , etc.) might well be " areal features ". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not
5696-571: The language has only two phonemically distinct vowels, which have several allophones depending on the palatal and/or labial quality of adjacent consonants. Labialised alveolo-palatal fricatives are found in the Bzyp and Sadz dialects of Abkhaz, but not in Abzhywa. Plain alveolo-palatal consonants and the pharyngealised and labialised-pharyngealised uvular fricatives are unique to the Bzyp dialect. The consonants highlighted in red and in brackets are
5785-444: The latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family. A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue ) being the root from which all languages in the family stem. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it
5874-550: The literary standard, and Besleney, which is intelligible with both Terek and Adyghe . Unlike the Adyghe, Kabardian lost many of the consonants that existed in the Proto-Circassian language , for example, the consonants /ʃʷʼ, ʐʷ, ʂʷ, ʐ, ʂ, tsʷ, dzʷ/ became /fʼ, v, f, ʑ, ɕ, f, v/ . Abkhaz has 100,000 speakers in Abkhazia (a de facto independent republic, but a de jure autonomous entity within Georgia ), where it
5963-462: The most preserved lexicon, with few borrowings. Abzhywa has adopted many loans from Kartvelian , specially Mingrelian ; Sadz on the other hand has more words from Circassian . Northern dialects in general have more loanwords from Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Circassian. Abkhaz has a very large number of consonants (58 in the literary dialect), with three-way voiced / voiceless / ejective and palatalized / labialized /plain distinctions. By contrast,
6052-513: The name refers to Caucasian Iberia , a kingdom centered in eastern Georgia which existed from the 4th century BCE to the 5th century CE; it is not related to the Iberian Peninsula.) Many Northwest Caucasian ( Adygean ) family names have prefixes like "Hath" or "Hatti", and one Adyghe tribe has the name " Hatuqwai " ( Adyghe : Хьатыкъуай ) (From Хьаты ("Hatti") + Кхъуэ ("male or son"); meaning "HattiSon"). It has been conjectured that
6141-414: The old vowels */i/ and */u/ but gaining the new consonants /kʲ/ and /kʷ/ . 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 */w-ka/ may have become /kʷa/ ), on the basis of pairs like Ubykh /ɡʲə/ vs. Kabardian and Abkhaz /ɡʷə/ heart . This same process is claimed by some to lie behind
6230-423: The oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic , is far younger than language itself. Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates. Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists
6319-538: The original dialects are still spoken in Abkhazia. The Bzyp dialect is still spoken in its homeland northwest of Sukhumi , stretching from the Bzyp River to the western environs of Sukhumi and the Psyrtskha valley, whereas the Abzhywa dialect is spoken south-east of Sukhumi. The rest of the Abkhaz speaking population inhabits other neighbouring areas. The exact number of Abkhazians and Abkhaz speakers in Turkey
6408-541: The other language. Abkhaz language Abkhaz , also known as Abkhazian , is a Northwest Caucasian language most closely related to Abaza . It is spoken mostly by the Abkhaz people . It is one of the official languages of Abkhazia , where around 190,000 people speak it. Furthermore, it is spoken by thousands of members of the Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey , Georgia 's autonomous republic of Adjara , Syria , Jordan , and several Western countries. 27 October
6497-454: The other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship . There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of
6586-470: The possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having borrowed the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and borrowing have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words,
6675-563: The proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages , including Spanish , French , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , Catalan , and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin . The Romance family itself is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia , all believed to have descended from
6764-527: The provinces of Sakarya and Bolu in the western part, and near the Çoruh river in the north-east. Historically the dialects of Sadz, Ahchypsy and Tsabal were located in Abkhazia; Sadz being spoken from the Bzyp river to the Matsesta River , and further to the north-west bordering the Sochypsta River . Today they are exclusively spoken in the northwestern part of Turkey, specially in
6853-653: The purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin . Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate
6942-536: The putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion). In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family , wherein Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for
7031-413: The relationships may be too remote to be detectable. Alternative explanations for some basic observed commonalities between languages include developmental theories, related to the biological development of the capacity for language as the child grows from newborn. A language family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor are included in
7120-570: The remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related. When languages are in contact with one another , either of them may influence the other through linguistic interference such as borrowing. For example, French has influenced English , Arabic has influenced Persian , Sanskrit has influenced Tamil , and Chinese has influenced Japanese in this way. However, such influence does not constitute (and
7209-428: The standard Abzhywa dialect. The only dialects spoken in Abkhazia are Abzhywa and Bzyp. Northern dialects which are the basis for literary Abaza are spoken in Karachay-Cherkessia , while the other dialects such as Sadz are spoken in Turkey due to Russian invasions in the 19th century. While most differences are phonetic, differences in the lexicon are present, although mostly due to exterior contact. Bzyp contains
7298-823: The strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through the comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic , Tungusic , and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several scholars to believe they were related . These supposed relationships were later discovered to be derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. Eventually though, high amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to derive any more relationships; even
7387-438: The subject's and object's person, place, time, manner of action, negative, and other types of grammatical categories. All Northwest Caucasian languages are left-branching , so that the verb comes at the end of the sentence and modifiers such as relative clauses precede a noun. Northwest Caucasian languages do not generally permit more than one finite verb in a sentence, which precludes the existence of subordinate clauses in
7476-521: The system explicated in Chirikba (2003) (see Abkhaz alphabet for the details). DETR:detrimental BENF:benefactive PREV:preverb SPREV:stem preverb EXT:extension MSD:masdar Abkhaz morphology features a highly complex verb system that could be called a "sentence in miniature." Chirikba (2003) describes Abkhaz as a "verbocentric" language wherein verbs occupy the "central part of the morphology." However, despite its complexity, Abkhaz verbal morphology
7565-426: The term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups , and groups into complexes . A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock . The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there
7654-502: The tree model. The wave model uses isoglosses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages . A sprachbund
7743-451: The verb complex expresses either the subject of an intransitive verb in the absolutive construction, or the direct object of a transitive verb in an ergative construction. The following table illustrates the various agreement markers which can occupy the first position. These prefixes can either be in their long forms, containing the letters inside the parenthesis, or in the short forms that do not contain them. The rules for using them are
7832-402: Was invited to teach the Abkhazian language, and from 1925, this mission was continued by Dimitri Gulia and Simon Janashia . Abkhaz is generally viewed as having three major dialects: The literary language is based on the Abzhywa dialect. Below is a classification of Abkhaz dialects according to Chirikba (1996): In some form or the other, all dialects are richer in phonemes than
7921-423: Was the only Northwest Caucasian language never to have a literary form. A number of factors make the reconstruction of the Northwest Caucasian proto-language problematic: For these reasons, Proto–Northwest Caucasian is widely accepted as being one of the most difficult proto-languages to deal with, and it is therefore more difficult than most to relate to other families. Some scholars have seen affinities between
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