Lak language

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Lak лакку маз (lakku maz)
Spoken in:	Southern Dagestan
Total speakers:	120,000
Language family:	North Caucasian Northeast Caucasian Lak
Writing system:	Cyrillic (Lak variant)
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`cau`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`lbe`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Lak language (лакку маз, lakku maz) is the language of the Lak people from the Russian autonomous republic of Dagestan, where it is one of the six literary languages. It is spoken by about 120,000 people and belongs to the Nachsko-Daghestan branch of North Caucasian languages. In the past it was also referred to as ГЬази-КЬумукь (Ghazi-Qumuq), which was transliterated via Russian as Кази-Кумук (Kazi-Kumuk) or Каси-Кумук (Kasi-Kumuk).

Until 1928, the Arabic script was used to display the language. Afterwards it was written in the Latin script for ten years, and since 1938 it is written with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Lak has throughout the centuries adopted a number of loan words from Turkish, Persian and Russian.

There are a newspaper and a broadcasting station in Lak.