Budukh or Budugh (, ) is a
Lezgic language of the
Northeast Caucasian language family spoken in parts of the
Quba Rayon
Quba District (; ) is one of the 66 Administrative divisions of Azerbaijan, districts of Azerbaijan. Located in the northeast of the country, it belongs to the Guba-Khachmaz Economic Region. The district borders the districts of Qusar District, ...
of
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan, officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, is a Boundaries between the continents, transcontinental and landlocked country at the boundary of West Asia and Eastern Europe. It is a part of the South Caucasus region and is bounded by ...
. It is spoken by about 200 of approximately 1,000 ethnic
Budukhs.
[
Budukh is a severely ]endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...
,[The sociolinguistic situation of the Budukh in Azerbaijan](_blank)
/ref> and classified as such by UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO ) is a List of specialized agencies of the United Nations, specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) with the aim of promoting world peace and International secur ...
's ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
The UNESCO ''Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger'' was an online publication containing a comprehensive list of the world's endangered languages. It originally replaced the ''Red Book of Endangered Languages'' as a title in print after ...
''.
Orthography
There are two orthographies for Budukh, and it is beginning to be introduced into schools. The orthography takes the following form:
The Buduq Picture Dictionary by Adigözəl Hacıyev, published in 2017, uses a slightly different orthography:
The ''Budud dili'' school manual by Adigözəl Hacıyev, published in 2025, uses another revision.
Grammar
Gender and agreement
Authier (2010) reports that Budugh has six 'gender-number' classes:
*human masculine,
*human adult feminine,
*animate (which includes animals, plants, and non-adult human females, as well as some abstract nouns),
*inanimate,
*nonhuman plural,
*human plural.
Verbs normally agree with their absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...
argument (intransitive subject or transitive object) in gender. In the following examples, the verb 'beat' shows animate agreement with 'donkey' and non-human plural agreement with 'donkeys'.
Compare these examples with the following, where the verb agrees with the intransitive subject:
Verb agreement
Budukh verbs typically agree with a single argument, the absolutive. In the agreement paradigms, the majority of verbs show no overt agreement for the masculine, neuter, and nonhuman plural. Consider the following paradigm for the verb 'keep' in the perfective (Authier 2009):
In this paradigm, /ˤa/ is a preverb which must appear with the verb root /q/ 'keep', and the agreement morphology appears between the preverb and the root. Due to historical changes, the relationships between the various members of an agreement paradigm are often more complex and show changes of vowel and/or consonant. The following perfective paradigm for 'go' shows this (with the reconstructed form shown after the *)
Word order
Budukh is an SOV language, as seen in the following example:
It has possessors before possessed nouns:
Adjectives appear before the nouns that they modify:
References
*
*
External links
Budukh basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Budukh Language
Northeast Caucasian languages
Languages of Azerbaijan
Endangered Caucasian languages