Andi is a Northeast Caucasian language belonging to the Avar–Andic branch spoken by about 5,800 ethnic

Andi Andi or ANDI may refer to: People and fictional characters * Andy (given name), including people and fictional characters with the name Andi * Andi people, an ethnic group of Dagestan, Russia Places * Andi, Guizhou, a town in Jinsha County, Guiz ...

(2010) in the Botlikh region 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 Ca ...

. The language is spoken in the villages

(along the river Andi-Koisu),The peoples of the Red Book: Akhvakhs
/ref> Gunkha, Gagatl, Ashali, Rikvani, Chanko, Zilo, and Kvanxidatl. There are four main dialects, Munin, Rikvani, Kvanxidatl, and Gagatl, which appear quite divergent. However, the dialects can be said to vary between villages: the "upper-group" contains Andi, Gagatl, Rikvani, and Zilo (where Andi and Zilo are considered their own dialects), whereas the "lower-group" contains Munin and Kvanxidatl. The upper-group lacks the affricate sound кьI. Although Andi is usually non written, there are attempts to write the language using Russian Cyrillic script. Speakers generally use Avar or

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 ...

as their literary language(s). Andi has 7 different series of localization: the meaning "inside" changes by number (singular -ла/-а, plural -хъи: гьакъу-ла 'in a home', гьакъоба-хъи 'in houses'). Number categories are expressed through

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...

(имуво воцци в-усон 'The father found the brother', but имуво воццул в-осон 'The father found the brothers'). In the village

, there is a difference between the speech of men and women; a man will say, for example, дин meaning 'I', мин meaning 'you', гьекIа 'person', but a woman will say ден 'I', мен 'you', гьекIва 'person'.

Phonology

Andi has 43 consonants:Consonant Systems of the North-East Caucasian Languages: Andi
/ref> There are five vowels: .

Phonology

References

Further reading