Avar (, , "language of the mountains" or , , "Avar language"), also known as Avaric,
is a
Northeast Caucasian
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in ...
language of the
Avar–Andic subgroup that is spoken by
Avars, primarily in
Dagestan
Dagestan ( ; rus, Дагеста́н, , dəɡʲɪˈstan, links=yes), officially the Republic of Dagestan (russian: Респу́блика Дагеста́н, Respúblika Dagestán, links=no), is a republic of Russia situated in the North C ...
. In 2010, there were approximately 1 million speakers in Dagestan and elsewhere in
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
.
Geographic distribution
It is spoken mainly in the western and southern parts of the Russian Caucasus republic of
Dagestan
Dagestan ( ; rus, Дагеста́н, , dəɡʲɪˈstan, links=yes), officially the Republic of Dagestan (russian: Респу́блика Дагеста́н, Respúblika Dagestán, links=no), is a republic of Russia situated in the North C ...
, and the
Balaken,
Zaqatala regions of north-western
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of th ...
.
Some
Avars live in other regions of Russia. There are also small communities of speakers living in the Russian republics of
Chechnya
Chechnya ( rus, Чечня́, Chechnyá, p=tɕɪtɕˈnʲa; ce, Нохчийчоь, Noxçiyçö), officially the Chechen Republic,; ce, Нохчийн Республика, Noxçiyn Respublika is a republic of Russia. It is situated in the ...
and
Kalmykia
he official languages of the Republic of Kalmykia are the Kalmyk and Russian languages./ref>
, official_lang_list= Kalmyk
, official_lang_ref=Steppe Code (Constitution) of the Republic of Kalmykia, Article 17: he official languages of the ...
; in
Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to the ...
,
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Central Asia and partly in Eastern Europe. It borders Russia to the north and west, China to the east, Kyrgyzstan to the southeast, Uzbeki ...
,
Ukraine
Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
,
Jordan
Jordan ( ar, الأردن; tr. ' ), officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,; tr. ' is a country in Western Asia. It is situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, within the Levant region, on the East Bank of the Jordan Rive ...
, and the
Marmara Sea
The Sea of Marmara,; grc, Προποντίς, Προποντίδα, Propontís, Propontída also known as the Marmara Sea, is an inland sea located entirely within the borders of Turkey. It connects the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea via the ...
region of
Turkey
Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...
. It is spoken by about 762,000 people worldwide.
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
classifies Avar as vulnerable to extinction.
Status
It is one of six literary languages of Dagestan, where it is spoken not only by the Avar, but also serves as the language of communication between different ethnic groups.
Dialects
There are two main dialect groups: the northern, which includes
Khunzakh
Khunzakh ( av, Хунзахъ, , russian: Хунзах) is a rural locality (a '' selo'') and the administrative center of Khunzakhsky District in the Republic of Dagestan, Russia, located in the North Caucasus mountains above sea level. Populati ...
,
Kazbek
Mount Kazbek or Mount Kazbegi is a dormant stratovolcano and one of the major mountains of the Caucasus, located on the Russian-Georgian border - in Russia's North Ossetia region and Georgia's Kazbegi District.
At 5,034 m (16,515 ft) high, i ...
,
Gunib
Gunib ( av, Гъуниб), also spelled Ghunib,e.g., Francis Galton, ''Vacation Tourists and Notes of Travel in 1860 861, 1862-3', Vol. 3, p. 81; Moshe Gammer, ''Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan' ...
,
Gumbet and others; and the southern, which includes
Andalal,
Gidatl',
Antsukh
Antsukh (russian: links=no, Анцух) is a rural locality (a selo) in Chadakolobsky Selsoviet, Tlyaratinsky District, Republic of Dagestan, Russia. The population was 97 as of 2010.
Geography
Antsukh is located 13 km north of Tlyarata Tl ...
,
Charoda,
Tlyarata Tlyarata is the name of several rural localities in Russia:
* Tlyarata, Gumbetovsky District, Republic of Dagestan, a '' selo'' in Gumbetovsky District of the Republic of Dagestan
*Tlyarata, Tlyaratinsky District, Republic of Dagestan, a ''selo'' ...
,
Tsumada,
Tsunta
Tsunta (russian: Цунта) is a rural locality (a selo) and the administrative center of Tsuntinsky District of the Republic of Dagestan, Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern ...
and others.
Morphology
Avar is an
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...
language, of
SOV order.
Adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s do not inflect, outside of inflection for
noun class
In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...
in some adverbs of place: e.g. the in "inside" and "in front". Adverbs of place also distinguish
locative,
allative
In grammar, the allative case (; abbreviated ; from Latin ''allāt-'', ''afferre'' "to bring to") is a type of locative grammatical case. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages that do not make finer ...
, and
ablative
In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. T ...
forms suffixally, such as "inside", "to the inside", and "from the inside". is an emphatic suffix taken by underived adjectives.
Phonology
There are competing analyses of the distinction transcribed in the table with the length sign . Length is part of the distinction, but so is articulatory strength, so they have been analyzed as
fortis and lenis
In linguistics, fortis and lenis ( and ; Latin for "strong" and "weak"), sometimes identified with tense and lax, are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis consonants, such as the ...
. The fortis affricates are long in the fricative part of the contour, e.g. (tss), not in the stop part as in geminate affricates in languages such as Japanese and Italian (tts). Laver (1994) analyzes e.g. as a two-segment affricate–fricative sequence [] ().
Avar has five vowels, /a, e, i, o, u/.
Writing system
There were some attempts to write the Avar language in the Georgian alphabet as early as the 14th century.
[Simon Crisp,"Language Planning and the Orthography of Avar", ''Folia Slavica'' 7, 1–2 (1984): 91–104.][Simon Crisp, "The Formation and Development of Literary Avar", pp. 143–62, in Isabelle T. Kreindler, ed., ''Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages: Their Past, Present and Future'', Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 40 (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1985).] The use of
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...
for representing Avar in marginal glosses began in the 15th century. The use of Arabic, which is known as ''
ajam'', is still known today.
[
As part of Soviet language re-education policies in 1928 the Ajam was replaced by a Latin alphabet, which in 1938 was in turn replaced by the current ]Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...
. Essentially, it is the Russian alphabet plus one additional letter called ''palochka
The palochka or palotchka () ( rus, палочка, p=ˈpaɫətɕkə, r=palochka, literally "a stick") is a letter in the Cyrillic script. The letter usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text. The capital form of the ...
'' (''stick'', Ӏ). As that letter cannot be typed with common keyboard layout
A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard.
is the actua ...
s, it is often replaced with a capital Latin letter i ( ''I'' ), small Latin letter L ( ''l'' ), or the numerical digit ''1''.
Orthography
The Avar language is usually written in the Cyrillic script
The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, ...
. The letters of the alphabet are (with their pronunciation given below in IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
transcription):[Consonant Systems of the North-East Caucasian Languages on TITUS DIDACTICA](_blank)
/ref>
/ref>
History
The literary language is based on the болмацӏ (''bolmacʼ'')—''bo'' = "army" or "country", and ''macʼ'' = "language"—the common language used between speakers of different dialects and languages. The ''bolmacʼ'' in turn was mainly derived from the dialect of Khunzakh
Khunzakh ( av, Хунзахъ, , russian: Хунзах) is a rural locality (a '' selo'') and the administrative center of Khunzakhsky District in the Republic of Dagestan, Russia, located in the North Caucasus mountains above sea level. Populati ...
, the capital and cultural centre of the Avar region, with some influence from the southern dialects. Nowadays the literary language is influencing the dialects, levelling out their differences.
The most famous figure of modern Avar literature is Rasul Gamzatov
Rasul Gamzatovich Gamzatov ( av, ХӀамзатазул Расул ХӀамзатил вас, Ħamzatil Rasul Ħamzatil vas, ; russian: Расу́л Гамза́тович Гамза́тов, p=rɐˈsul ɡɐmˈzatəvʲɪtɕ ɡɐmˈzatəf, a=Rasu ...
(died November 3, 2003), the People's Poet of Dagestan. Translations of his works into Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
have gained him a wide audience all over the former Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...
.
Samples
See also
* Northeast Caucasian languages
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in ...
* Languages of the Caucasus
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 th ...
References
External links
RFE/RL North Caucasus Radio (also includes Chechen and Adyghe)
Avar language corpus
(in English, Russian, Polish and Belarusian)
Avar Cyrillic-Latin text and website converter
Online Avar–Russian dictionary
{{Authority control
Agglutinative languages
Subject–object–verb languages
Languages written in Cyrillic script