Chirag (Chirag: хьаргънилла, ''xarʁnilla kub'') is a language in the
Dargin dialect continuum spoken in
Dagestan
Dagestan ( ; ; ), officially the Republic of Dagestan, is a republic of Russia situated in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe, along the Caspian Sea. It is located north of the Greater Caucasus, and is a part of the North Caucasian Fede ...
,
Russia
Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...
. It is spoken around the village of
Chirag
''Chirag'' ( English: Light) is a 1969 Indian Bollywood film directed by Raj Khosla. The film stars Sunil Dutt and Asha Parekh in the lead roles. Apart from other plus points, it has the song "Teri Aankhon Ke Siwa" sung separately by Mohd. Raf ...
, but some speakers have moved to
Kaspiysk
Kaspiysk (; Lezgin: Каспи ; ) is a city in Dagestan, Russia, located on the Caspian Sea, southeast of Makhachkala. The 2010 Russian census recorded the city as being the fourth-largest in Dagestan. It is a working-class satellite city to ...
. Chirag is often considered a divergent dialect of
Dargwa, despite not being
mutually intelligible
In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between different but related language varieties in which speakers of the different varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. Mutual intellig ...
with
literary Dargwa.
Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' 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 comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...
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.
Phonology
Vowels
Chirag has four vowels: , , , and ,Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels.
On one hand, many ...
also exists for most vowels.
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').
Phonotactics
The permitted syllable structures
A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
are CV, CVC, and CVRT.
Grammar
Chirag is head-final
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed Principles and parameters, parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head (linguistics), head of a phrase precedes its Complement (linguistics), complement ...
, 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 subject of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the subject of a transitive verb. Exa ...
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:
Lexicon
Due to the proximity of Chirag to Aghul, Lak, and Lezgin, it has some loanwords from these languages, such as ''марххале'' ("snow", derived from Lak ''марххале'').
Usage
There are efforts to enable automated translation of text from English to Chirag.
References
External links
* ELAR archive o
Chirag Documentation Project
{{Languages of the Caucasus
Northeast Caucasian languages