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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 ...
language of the Avar–Andic subgroup that is spoken by Avars, primarily in Dagestan. In 2010, there were approximately 1 million speakers in Dagestan and elsewhere in
Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-ei ...
.


Geographic distribution

It is spoken mainly in the western and southern parts of the Russian Caucasus republic of Dagestan, 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 and Kalmykia; in Georgia,
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 inva ...
,
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 region of
Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula ...
. It is spoken by about 762,000 people worldwide.
UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international coope ...
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,
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, 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 Bhilai Charoda is a municipal corporation and a part of Bhilai city in the state of Chhattisgarh, India. Charoda is an industrial area of Bhilai city. Asia's longest railway marshaling yard is present in Charoda, Bhilai. Demographics As of 2001 ...
,
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 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 l ...
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 some adverbs of place: e.g. the in "inside" and "in front". Adverbs of place also distinguish locative, allative, and ablative 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. 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 th ...
for representing Avar in marginal glosses began in the 15th century. The use of Arabic, which is known as ''
ajam ''Ajam'' ( ar, عجم, ʿajam) is an Arabic word meaning mute, which today refers to someone whose mother tongue is not Arabic. During the Arab conquest of Persia, the term became a racial pejorative. In many languages, including Persian, Tu ...
'', 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, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...
. Essentially, it is the Russian alphabet plus one additional letter called '' palochka'' (''stick'', Ӏ). As that letter cannot be typed with common keyboard layouts, 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, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking c ...
. 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 A ...
transcription):Consonant Systems of the North-East Caucasian Languages on TITUS DIDACTICA
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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, 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 (died November 3, 2003), the People's Poet of Dagestan. Translations of his works into Russian 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 nationa ...
.


Samples


See also

* Northeast Caucasian languages * Languages of the Caucasus


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