Several names have been in use for this family. The most common term,Northeast Caucasian, contrasts the three established families of the Caucasian languages:Northeast Caucasian,Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz–Adyghean) andSouth Caucasian (Kartvelian). This may be shortened toEast Caucasian. The termNakh(o)-Dagestanian can be taken to reflect a primary division of the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, a view which is no longer widely accepted, orDagestanian can subsume the entire family. The rare termNorth Caspian (as in bordering the Caspian Sea) is only used in opposition to the use ofNorth Pontic (as in bordering the Black Sea) for the Northwest Caucasian languages.
Historically, Northeast Caucasian phonemic inventories were thought to be smaller than those of the neighboringNorthwest Caucasian family. However, more recent research has revealed that many Northeast Caucasian languages are much more phoneme-rich than previously believed, with some languages containing as many as 70 consonants.[1]: 49
In addition to numerousfront obstruents, many Northeast Caucasian languages also possess a number ofback consonants, includinguvulars,pharyngeals, and glottal stops and fricatives. Northeast Caucasian phonology is also notable for its use of numeroussecondary articulations as contrastive features. Whereas English consonant classes are divided into voiced and voiceless phonemes, Northeast Caucasian languages are known to contrast voiced, voiceless,ejective andtensephones, which contributes to their large phonemic inventories. Some languages also include palatalization and labialization as contrastive features.[1]: 49–54 Most languages in this family contrast tense and weak consonants. Tense consonants are characterized by the intensiveness of articulation, which naturally leads to a lengthening of these consonants.
In contrast to the generally large consonant inventories of Northeast Caucasian languages, most languages in the family have relatively few vowels, although more on average than the Northwest Caucasian languages.[2] However, there are some exceptions to this trend, such asChechen, which has at least twenty-eight vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs.[1]: 58
Percentage of Northeast Caucasian languages by speakers
These languages can be characterized by strongsuffixalagglutination. Weak tendencies towardsinflection may be noted as well.Nouns display covertnominal classification, but partially overt cases of secondary origin can be observed too. The number of noun classes in individual languages range from two to eight. Regardinggrammatical number, there may be a distinction between singular andplural, plurality itself may impact the class to which a noun belongs.[1]: 80 In some cases, a grammaticalcollective is seen. Many languages distinguishlocal versusfunctional cases,[1]: 81–82 and to some degree alsocasus rectus versuscasus obliquus.
Verbs do not agree withperson, with a few exceptions likeLak, in which first and second persons are marked with the same suffix and verbs agree with theP argument, andHunzib in which verbs agree withA argument.Evidentiality is prominent, with reported, sensory andepistemic moods all appearing as a way of conveying the evidence.Epistemic modality is often tied to the tense.
Most Northeast Caucasian languages exhibit anergative–absolutive morphology.[3] This means that objects of transitive sentences and subjects of intransitive sentences both fall into a single grammatical case known as the absolutive. Subjects of transitive sentences, however, carry a different marking to indicate that they belong to a separate case, known as the ergative.[4] This distinction can be seen in the following two Archi sentences. Objects and subjects of intransitive sentences carry no suffix, which is represented by the null suffix, -∅. Meanwhile, agents of transitive sentences take the ergative suffix, -mu.
Northeast Caucasian languages have between two and eight noun classes.[2] In these languages, nouns are grouped into grammatical categories depending on certain semantic qualities, such as animacy and gender. Each noun class has a corresponding agreement prefix, which can attach to verbs or adjectives of that noun. Prefixes may also have plural forms, used in agreement with a plural noun.[5] The following table shows the noun–adjective agreement paradigm in the Tsez language.
In many Northeast Caucasian languages, as well as appearing on adjectives and verbs, agreement can also be found on parts of speech which are not usually able to agree in other language families – for example on adverbs, postpositions, particles, and even case-marked nouns and pronouns.[6][7] In the example from Archi below, doːʕzub ‘big’ and abu ‘made’, but also the adverb ditːabu ‘quickly’ and the personal pronouns nenabu ‘we’ and belabu ‘to us’, all agree in number and gender with the argument in the absolutive case, χʕon ‘cow’.
This kind of clausal agreement has been labelled ‘external agreement’.[9] The same term is also used for the (cross-linguistically even rarer) phenomenon where a converb agrees with an argument which lies outside the converb's own clause. This is seen in the following example from Northern Akhvakh, where mīʟō ‘not having gone’ has a masculine adverbial suffix (-ō), agreeing with hugu ek’wa ‘the man’.
A long-time classification divided the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, whence the term Nakho-Dagestanian.[11] However, attempts at reconstructing the protolanguage suggest that the Nakh languages are no more divergent from Dagestanian than the various branches of Dagestanian are from each other,[12] although this is still not universally accepted. The following outline, based on the work of linguistBernard Comrie and others, has been adopted byEthnologue. An Avar–Andi–Dido branch was abandoned, but has been resurrected as the "New Type" languages in Schulze (2009, 2013) and Lak–Dargwa has likewise returned.
One factor complicating internal classification within the family is that the diachronic development of its respective branches is marked both by an extreme degree of diffusion and divergence followed by secondaryconvergence, which complicates the comparative method.[13]
Spoken in the Northwest Dagestan highlands and western Dagestan. Avar is the lingua franca for these and theTsezic languages and is the only literary language.Schulze (2009) gives the following family tree for the Avar–Andic languages:
Tabasaran was once thought to be the language with the largest number of grammatical cases at 54, which could, depending on the analysis, instead be theTsez language with 64.
Spoken mostly in Southwest Dagestan. None are literary languages. Formerly classified geographically as East Tsezic (Hinukh, Bezta) and West Tsezic (Tsez, Khwarshi, Hunzib), these languages may actually form different subgroupings[clarification needed] according to the latest research bySchulze (2009):
Some linguists—notablyIgor M. Diakonoff and Starostin—see evidence of a genealogical connection between the Northeast Caucasian family and the extinct languagesHurrian andUrartian.[27] Hurrian was spoken in various parts of theFertile Crescent in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. Urartian was the language ofUrartu, a powerful state that existed between 1000 BC or earlier and 585 BC in the area centered onLake Van in currentTurkey. The two languages are classified together as theHurro-Urartian family. Diakonoff proposed the nameAlarodian for the inclusion of Hurro-Urartian into Northeast Caucasian.
Some scholars, however, doubt that the language families are related[28] or believe that, while a connection is possible, the evidence is far from conclusive.[29][30]
Below are selected Proto-Northeast Caucasian reconstructions of basic vocabulary items byJohanna Nichols, which she refers to asProto-Nakh-Daghestanian.[31]
The Proto-Northeast Caucasian language had many terms foragriculture andJohanna Nichols has suggested that its speakers may have been involved in the development of agriculture in theFertile Crescent and only later moved north to the Caucasus.[32] Proto-NEC is reconstructed with words for concepts such asyoke (*...ƛ / *...ƛƛ’), as well as fruit trees such asapple (*hʕam(V)c / *hʕam(V)č) andpear (*qur / *qar; *qʕur ?),[31] that suggest agriculture was well developed before the proto-language broke up.
^Wolfgang Schulze (2017). "The comparative method in Caucasian linguistics". In Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Mathias; Klein, Jared (eds.).Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton. p. 106.ISBN978-3-11-018614-7.The twenty-nine languages of East Caucasian are marked by both an extreme degree of diffusion/divergence and secondary convergence, which renders the application of the comparative method more difficult.
^Pereltsvaig, Asya (2012).Languages of the World: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 65.
^abMatthews, W.K. (1951).Languages of the U.S.S.R. New York: Russell & Russell. pp. 87–88.
^Nichols, J. 1997 "Nikolaev and Starostin'sNorth Caucasian Etymological Dictionary and the Methodology of Long-Range Comparison: an assessment". Paper presented at the 10th Biennial Non-Slavic Languages (NSL) Conference, Chicago, 8–10 May 1997.
^abDʹi︠a︡konov, Igorʹ Mikhaĭlovich; Starostin, S. A. (1986).Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language. Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft. München: R. Kitzinger.ISBN978-3-920645-39-1.
^Smeets, Rieks (1989). "On Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language".Bibliotheca Orientalis.XLVI (3/4):260–280.
^Zimansky, Paul (September 2011), "Urartian and the Urartians", in McMahon, Gregory; Steadman, Sharon (eds.),The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia: (10,000–323 BCE), pp. 548–559,doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376142.013.0024,Sayce, for example, considered a relationship with Georgian, 'or with any of the Caucasian languages such as Ude or Abkhas,' but admitted he lacked the tools to explore this. […] That Hurro-Urartian as a whole shared a yet earlier common ancestor with some of the numerous and comparatively obscure languages of the Caucasus is not improbable. […] Diakonoff and Starostin, in the most thorough attempt at finding a linkage yet published, have argued that Hurro-Urartian is a branch of the eastern Caucasian family […]. The etymologies, sound correspondences, and comparative morphologies these authors present are quite tentative and viewed with skepticism by many.
^Gamkrelidze, Thomas V.; Gudava, T.E. (1998),"Caucasian Languages",Encyclopædia Britannica,theories relating Caucasian with […] the non-Indo-European and non-Semitic languages of the ancient Middle East also lack sufficient evidence and must be considered as inconclusive
^abNichols, Johanna. 2003. The Nakh-Daghestanian consonant correspondences. In Dee Ann Holisky and Kevin Tuite (eds.),Current Trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian Linguistics: Papers in honor of Howard I. Aronson, 207–264. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.doi:10.1075/cilt.246.14nic
Schulze, Wolfgang (2001), "Die kaukasischen Sprachen", in M. Haspelmath; et al. (eds.),La typologie des langues et les universaux linguistiques, vol. 2,Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1774–1796
