Chirag (Chirag: ''xarʁnilla kub'') is a language in the
Dargin dialect continuum spoken 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 ...
,
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 ...
. It is often considered a divergent dialect of
Dargwa.
Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
lists it under the dialects of Dargwa but recognizes that it may be a separate language.
[Ethnologue report for Dargwa](_blank)
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Classification
Based on lexical similarity, Chirag is usually classified as a separate language from other varieties of Dargwa.Kaitag Kaitak, Kajtak, or Kaitag may refer to the following topics associated with a region in Dagestan, Russia:
* Kaitag State, a historic principality
* Kaytagsky District, the current administrative unit
* Kaitags, an ethnic group
* Kaitak language, ...
; within the South group, it has 84% lexical similarity with Qunqi Amuq.
Phonology
Vowels
Chirag has four vowels: , , , and .
Prosody
In Chirag, stressed syllables are specified for tone.
Morphophonology
Chirag has some phonological processes that pertain to specific morphological elements. The plural suffix ''-e'' attracts stress and induces vowel deletion on the final syllable of disyllabic nouns (e.g., ''qisqan'' 'spider', ''qisqne'' 'spiders').
Grammar
Chirag is head-final
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the ...
, has fairly flexible word order and is rich with inflectional morphology.ergative–absolutive alignment
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument (" subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a tra ...
in its case marking; the subject of a transitive verb is overtly marked with ergative case, and the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are unmarked:
References
External links
* ELAR archive o
Chirag Documentation Project
{{Languages of the Caucasus
Northeast Caucasian languages