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) and South Caucasian (Kartvelian). This may be shortened to East Caucasian. The term Nakh(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, or Dagestanian can subsume the entire family. The rare term North Caspian (as in bordering the Caspian Sea) is only used in opposition to the use of North Pontic (as in bordering the Black Sea) for the Northwest Caucasian languages.
Linguistic features
Phonology
Historically, Northeast Caucasian phonemic inventories were thought to be smaller than those of the neighboring Northwest 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]
In addition to numerous front obstruents, many Northeast Caucasian languages also possess a number of back consonants, including uvulars, pharyngeals, and glottal stops and fricatives. Northeast Caucasian phonology is also notable for its use of numerous secondary 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 and tensephones, which contributes to their large phonemic inventories. Some languages also include palatalization and labialization as contrastive features.[2] 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.[3] However, there are some exceptions to this trend, such as Chechen, which has at least twenty-eight vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs.[4]
Percentage of Northeast Caucasian languages by speakers
These languages can be characterized by strong suffixalagglutination. Weak tendencies towards inflection may be noted as well. Nouns display covert nominal 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. Regarding grammatical number, there may be a distinction between singular and plural, plurality itself may impact the class to which a noun belongs.[5] In some cases, a grammatical collective is seen. Many languages distinguish local versus functional cases,[6] and to some degree also casus rectus versus casus obliquus.
Verbs do not agree with person, with a few exceptions like Lak, in which first and second persons are marked with the same suffix and verbs agree with the P argument, and Hunzib in which verbs agree with A argument. Evidentiality is prominent, with reported, sensory and epistemic moods all appearing as a way of conveying the evidence. Epistemic modality is often tied to the tense.
Ergativity
Most Northeast Caucasian languages exhibit an ergative–absolutive morphology.[7] 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.[8] 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.[3] 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.[10] 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.[11][12] 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’.[14] 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.[16] 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,[17] although this is still not universally accepted. The following outline, based on the work of linguist Bernard Comrie and others, has been adopted by Ethnologue. 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 secondary convergence, which complicates the comparative method.[18]
Spoken in the Northwest Dagestan highlands and western Dagestan. Avar is the lingua franca for these and the Tsezic 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 the Tsez 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 by Schulze (2009):
Some linguists—notably Igor M. Diakonoff and Starostin—see evidence of a genealogical connection between the Northeast Caucasian family and the extinct languages Hurrian and Urartian. Hurrian was spoken in various parts of the Fertile Crescent in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. Urartian was the language of Urartu, a powerful state that existed between 1000 BC or earlier and 585 BC in the area centered on Lake Van in current Turkey. The two languages are classified together as the Hurro-Urartian family. Diakonoff proposed the name Alarodian for the union of Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian.
Some scholars, however, doubt that the language families are related[33] or believe that, while a connection is possible, the evidence is far from conclusive.[34][35]
Proto-language
Proto-Northeast Caucasian
Reconstruction of
Northeast Caucasian languages
Below are selected Proto-Northeast Caucasian reconstructions of basic vocabulary items by Johanna Nichols, which she refers to as Proto-Nakh-Daghestanian.[36]
gloss
Proto-Nakh-Daghestanian
eye
*(b)ul, *(b)al
tooth
*cVl-
tongue
*maʒ-i
hand, arm
*kV, *kol-
back (of body)
*D=uqq’
heart
*rVk’u / *Vrk’u
bile, gall
*sttim
meat
*(CV)=(lV)ƛƛ’
bear (animal)
*sVʔin / *cVʔin / *čVʔin
sun
*bVrVg
moon
*baʒVr / *buʒVr
earth
*(l)ončči
water
*ɬɬin
fire
*c’ar(i), *c’ad(i)
ashes
*rV=uqq’ / *rV=uƛƛ’
road
*D=eqq’ / *D=aqq’
name
*cc’Vr, *cc’Vri
die, kill
*D=Vƛ’
burn
*D=Vk’
know
*(=D=)Vc’
black
*alč’i- (*ʕalč’i-)
long, far
*(CV=)RVxx-
round
*goRg / *gog-R-
dry
*D=aqq’(u) / *D=uqq’
thin
*(C)=uƛ’Vl-
what
*sti-
one
*cV (*cʕV ?)
five
*(W)=ƛƛi / *ƛƛwi
Notation: C = consonant; V = vowel; D = gender affix
Possible connections to the origin of agriculture
The Proto-Northeast Caucasian language had many terms for agriculture and Johanna Nichols has suggested that its speakers may have been involved in the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent and only later moved north to the Caucasus.[37] Proto-NEC is reconstructed with words for concepts such as yoke (*...ƛ / *...ƛƛ’), as well as fruit trees such as apple (*hʕam(V)c / *hʕam(V)č) and pear (*qur / *qar; *qʕur ?),[36] that suggest agriculture was well developed before the proto-language broke up.
^Wolfgang Schulze (2017). "11. 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's North 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.
^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
