The Bezhta (or Bezheta) language (Bezhta: бежкьалас миц, ''bežƛʼalas mic'', ''beƶⱡʼalas mic'', ), also known as Kapucha (from the name of a large villageShirin Akiner, ''Islamic Peoples of the Soviet Union'', 2nd ed. (KPI, Distributed by Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986: ), p. 253.), belongs to the Tsezic group of the North Caucasian language family. It is spoken by about 6,200 people in southern

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 ...

Ethnologue entry for Bezhta
/ref> Bezhta can be divided into three dialects – Bezhta Proper, Tlyadal and Khocharkhotin – which are spoken in various villages in the region. Its closest linguistic relatives are Hunzib and Khwarshi. Bezhta is unwritten, but various attempts have been made to develop an official orthography for the language. The

Bezhta people The Bezhta (also Kapuchi) are an Andi–Dido people living in the Tsuntinsky region in southwestern Dagestan. In the 1930s along with the rest of the Andi-Dido peoples they were classified as Avars. However, some people identified themselves as ...

use Avar as the literary language. The first book ever printed in Bezhta was the

Gospel of Luke The Gospel of Luke), or simply Luke (which is also its most common form of abbreviation). tells of the origins, birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Together with the Acts of the Apostles, it makes up a two-volu ...

Phonology

Bezhta has a rich consonantal and – unlike its relatives Tsez and Avar – a relatively large vowel inventory (18 distinct vowel phonemes), compared to other languages of the same family. Consonants:

Morphology

Bezhta is mostly

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 ...

and the vast amount of

locative case In grammar, the locative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases, together with the ...

s makes its case system particularly rich. The verb morphology is relatively simple. It is an

ergative language The term ergative is used in grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also ...

Numerals

Unlike Tsez, Bezhta has a decimal system with the word for twenty being an exception. * Multiples of 10 higher than 20 are formed by adding the suffix -yig (-йиг) to the multiplier. Hence, the word for 30 is łanayig (лъанайиг). * Compound numbers are formed by

juxtaposition Juxtaposition is an act or instance of placing two elements close together or side by side. This is often done in order to compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences, etc. Speech Juxtaposition in literary terms is the showing ...

, the smaller numbers following the greater ones. The number 47 is thus expressed as ṏqʼönäyig aƛna (оь^нкъоьнаьйиг алIна).

Sample of the Bezhta language

This is a passage taken from the

written in a Cyrillic orthography based on Avar and Chechen, a Latinized transcription and one 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 ...

References

External links

*
The Bezhta People and Language
(P.J. Hillery)
Bezhta Vocabulary List
(from the World Loanword Database)
Bezhta basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bezhta Language Agglutinative languages Northeast Caucasian languages Languages of Russia Dagestan Endangered Caucasian languages