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 different language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other. However, the languages of the Caucasus are sometimes mistakenly referred 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 language families of the Caucasus as unrelated."[1]
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.[citation needed]
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, Mingrelian and Laz.
Northeast Caucasian, also called the Nakh-Daghestanian or Caspian family, with a total of about 4.3 million speakers. Includes the Chechen language with 1.7 million speakers, the Avar language with 1 million speakers, the Ingush language with 500,000 speakers, the Lezgian language with 800,000 speakers, and others.
Northwest Caucasian, also called the Abkhazo-Adyghean, Circassian, or Pontic family, with a total of about 2.5 million speakers. Includes the Kabardian language, with one million speakers.
The Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families are notable for their high number of consonantphonemes (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 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 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).
External relations
Since the birth of comparative linguistics in the 19th century, scholars have attempted to relate them to each other or to languages outside the Caucasus region. 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.
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.
There are no known affinities between the South Caucasian and North Caucasian families. Nevertheless, some scholars have proposed the single name Ibero-Caucasian for all the Caucasian language families, North and South, in an attempt to unify the Caucasian languages under one family.
Hattic
Some linguists have claimed affinities between the Northwest Caucasian (Circassian) family and the extinct Hattic language of central Anatolia. See the article on Northwest Caucasian languages for details.
^Zelkina, Anna (2000). In Quest for God and Freedom: The Sufi Response to the Russian Advance in the North Caucasus. C. Hurst & Co. p. 31. ISBN9781850653844.
^Nichols, 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
^Chirikba, Viacheslav. 1996. Common West Caucasian: The Reconstruction of its Phonological System and Parts of its Lexicon and Morphology. Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies. ISBN 978-9073782716.
^Klimov, G. (1998). Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Further reading
Kovalevskaia, V. B "Central Ciscaucasia in Antiquity and Early Middle Ages: Caucasian Substratum and Migrations of the Iranic-Speaking Tribes." (1988).