Abkhaz language

Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken in Georgia and Turkey by the Abkhazians. Abkhaz has about 100,000 speakers in Abkhazia with up to 500,000 more living in Turkey. The Georgian constitution establishes Abkhaz as the second official language of Georgia within the territory of Abkhazia.

Classification

Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language, indicating it originated in the northwest Caucasus. Northwest Caucasian languages have been suggested as being related to the Northeast Caucasian languages and both are often merged under the blanket term "North Caucasian languages"; several linguists, notably Sergei Starostin, posit a phylogenetic link between these two families. Some consider the proposed North Caucasian family to be a member of the Dene-Caucasian macrofamily; however, the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis is itself unproven and highly controversial, and attempts to categorize Abkhaz as a Dene-Caucasian language are thus premature. Also, sometimes the North Caucasian families are grouped with the South Caucasian languages into a pan-Caucasian or Ibero-Caucasian macrofamily, but these have not been shown conclusively to be related and are widely considered to be a geographically based convention.

Abkhaz is often united with Abaza into one language, Abkhaz-Abaza, of which the literary dialects of Abkhaz and Abaza are simply two ends of a dialect continuum. Grammatically, the two are very similar; however, the differences in phonology are substantial, and are the main reason why many other linguists prefer to keep the two separate. Most linguists (see for instance Chirikba 2003) believe that Ubykh is the closest relative of the Abkhaz-Abaza dialect continuum.

Geographical distribution

Abkhaz is spoken primarily in Abkhazia and Turkey.

Official status

Abkhaz is the official language of The Republic of Abkhazia.

Dialects

Abkhaz is generally viewed as having three major dialects: Abzhywa (En: Abžui) and Bzyp, spoken in the Caucasus, and Sadz, spoken in Turkey.

Phonemes

Consonants

Like the other Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz is very rich in consonants. Below is the IPA phoneme chart of the consonant phonemes of Abkhaz:

		labial	alveolar		post- alveolar		alveolo- palatal		retro- flex	velar			uvular					pharyngeal
			plain	labial	plain	labial	plain	labial		palatal.	plain	labial	palatal.	plain	labial	pharyng.	lab. + phar.	plain	labial
stop	voiceless	p	t	tʷ						kʲ	k	kʷ
	voiced	b	d	dʷ						gʲ	g	gʷ
	ejective	p’	t’	tʷ’						kʲ’	k’	kʷ’	qʲ’	q’	qʷ’
affricate	voiceless		ts		tʃ		tɕ	tɕʷ	tʂ
	voiced		dz		dʒ		dʑ	dʑʷ	dʐ
	ejective		ts’		tʃ’		tɕ’	tɕʷ’	tʂ’
fricative	voiceless	f	s		ʃ	ʃʷ	ɕ	ɕʷ	ʂ				χʲ	χ	χʷ	χˁ	χˁʷ	ħ	ħʷ
	voiced	v	z		ʒ	ʒʷ	ʑ	ʑʷ	ʐ				ʁʲ	ʁ	ʁʷ
nasal		m	n
approximant							j	ɥ				w
trill			r
lateral			l

Phonemes in green are found in the Bzyp and Sadz dialects of Abkhaz, but not in Abzhywa; phonemes in red are unique to the Bzyp dialect. The Sadz dialect also has distinctive consonant gemination; for example, Sadz Abkhaz contrasts /a.χʷa/ ashes vs. /a.χːʷa/ worm, where Abzhywa and Bzyp Abkhaz have only the one form /a.χʷa/ for both. The plain alveolopalatal affricates and fricatives have merged with their corresponding alveolars in Abzhywa and Sadz (e.g. Bzyp /a.tɕ’a.ra/ to know vs. Abzhywa /a.ts’a.ra/), and in Abzhywa the labialised alveolopalatal fricatives have merged with the corresponding postalveolars.

The uvular fricatives of Abkhaz may be realised as either velar or uvular depending upon the context in which they are found; here, they have been ranged with the uvulars. Also, while the labialised palatal approximant /jʷ/ is here placed with the approximants, it is actually the reflex of a labialised voiced pharyngeal fricative, preserved in Abaza.

Vowels

Abkhaz has only two distinctive vowels: an open vowel /a/ and a close vowel /ı, ǝ/. These basic vowels have a wide range of allophones in different consonantal environments, with allophones [i] and [e] next to palatals, [u] and [o] next to labials, and [y] and [ø] next to labiopalatals. /a/ also has a long variant /aː/, which is the reflex of old sequences of */ʕa/ or */aʕ/, preserved in Abaza.

Typology

Abkhaz is typologically classified as an agglutinative language. Like all other Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz has an extremely complex verbal system coupled with a very simple noun system; Abkhaz distinguishes just two cases, the nominative and the adverbial.

Writing system

Main article: Abkhaz alphabet

Abkhaz has had its own adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet since 1862. The first alphabet was a 37-character Cyrillic alphabet invented by Baron Peter von Uslar. In 1909 a 55 letter Cyrillic alphabet was used. A 75-letter Latin script devised by a Georgian linguist Nikolai (Niko) Marr lasted from 1926 to 1928, when another Latin script was used. The Georgian script was imposed in 1938, but after the death of Stalin, an Abkhaz desire to remain separate from Georgians led to the reintroduction of the current Cyrillic alphabet in 1954 designed in 1892 by Dimitri Gulya together with Konstantin Machavariani and modified in 1909 by Aleksey Chochua.

History

The earliest extant written records of the Abkhazian language are in the Arabic alphabet, recorded by the Turkish traveller Evliya Celebi in the 17th century. Abkhaz has only been used as a literary language for about 100 years. During the Stalinist Russian years Abkhaz was banned as a literary language.

Bibliography

• Chirikba, V. A. (1996) 'A Dictionary of Common Abkhaz'. Leiden.
• Chirikba, V. A. (2003) 'Abkhaz'. – Languages of the World/Materials 119. Muenchen: Lincom Europa.
• Hewitt, B. George (1979) 'Abkhaz: A descriptive Grammar'. Amsterdam: North Holland.
• Hewitt, B. George (1989) Abkhaz. In John Greppin (ed.), The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus Vol. 2. Caravan Books, New York. 39-88.
• Vaux, Bert and Zihni Psiypa (1997) The Cwyzhy Dialect of Abkhaz. Harvard Working Papers in Linguistics 6, Susumu Kuno, Bert Vaux, and Steve Peter, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department.

External links

• Learn Abkhazian language!
• Ethnologue entry for Abkhaz
• Abkhaz entry in LanguageServer (University of Graz)
• Abkhaz entry in The Rosetta Project
• Abkhaz at Language Museum

Example of Abkhaz language: [1]