Languages of the Caucasus

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Ethno-Linguistic groups in the Caucasus region

The languages of the Caucasus are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, which lies between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Linguistic studies allow those languages to be classified into several language families, with little or no discernible affinity to each other.

Some of those language families have no known members outside the Caucasus area. The term Caucasian languages predominantly refers to these families, details concerning which are given below.

1 Language families
- 1.1 Families restricted to the Caucasus area
- 1.2 Families with wider distribution
2 Reference
3 Notes
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Language families

[edit] Families restricted to the Caucasus area

Main article: Caucasian languages

The indigenous Caucasian languages fall into three widely accepted language families. These families were essentially restricted to the Caucasus area through historic times, hence their common label Caucasian languages.

South Caucasian, also called the Kartvelian family. Includes Georgian, the official language of Georgia, with four million speakers.

Northwest Caucasian, also called the Abkhaz-Adyghe, Circassian, or Pontic family. Includes the Kabardian language, with one million speakers.

Northeast Caucasian, also called the Dagestanian, Nakho-Dagestanian, or Caspian family. Includes the Chechen language, with one million speakers.

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.

It is commonly believed that all Caucasian languages have a large number of consonants. While this is certainly true for most members of the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian families (inventories range up to the 80-84 consonants of Ubykh), the consonant inventories of the South Caucasian languages are not nearly as extensive, ranging from 28 (Georgian) to 30 (Laz) — comparable to languages like Arabic (28 consonants) and Russian (35-37 consonants).

[edit] Families with wider distribution

Other languages historically and presently spoken in the Caucasus area can be placed into families with a much wider geographical distribution.

[edit] Indo-European

The predominant Indo-European language in the Caucasus is Armenian, spoken by the Armenians (circa 4 million speakers). The Ossetians, speaking the Ossetic language, form another group of around 700,000 speakers. Other Indo-European languages spoken in the Caucasus include Persian, Greek, Pontic, Kurdish, Talysh, Judeo-Tat, and of the Slavic languages, Russian and Ukrainian, whose speakers number over a third of the total population of the Caucasus.

[edit] Altaic

Most of the Altaic languages spoken in the Caucasus are Turkic: of these, Azerbaijani is predominant, with around 6 million speakers in Azerbaijan. Other Turkic languages spoken include Balkar, Karachay, Kumyk, Nogai.

Kalmyk, spoken by the Oirat descendant Kalmyks in the region is a Mongolic language.

[edit] Semitic

The only Semitic language spoken in the Caucasus is Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, spoken by around 25,000 speakers, largely living in cities, who fled to Russia from Turkish persecution at the close of the First World War.