Tabasaran (also written Tabassaran) is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Lezgic branch. It is spoken by the Tabasaran people in the southern part of the

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 ...

n Republic of

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 ...

. There are two main dialects: North (Khanag) and South Tabasaran. It has a literary language based on the Southern dialect, one of the official languages of Dagestan. Tabasaran is an ergative language. The verb system is relatively simple; verbs agree with the subject in number, person and (in North Tabasaran) class. North Tabasaran has two

noun class In linguistics, a noun class is a particular category of nouns. A noun may belong to a given class because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some ...

es (that is,

grammatical gender In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is a specific form of a noun class system, where nouns are assigned to gender categories that are often not related to the real-world qualities of the entities denoted by those nouns. In languages wit ...

), whereas Southern Tabasaran lacks noun classes / gender.

Geographical distribution

It is spoken in the basin of Upper Rubas-nir and Upper Chirakh-nir.

Phonology

Consonants

The post-alveolar sibilants may be whistled.

Vowels

Vowel sounds of Tabasaran are , y, ɛ, æ, ɑ, u

Writing system

Cyrillic (19th century)

Peter von Uslar devised Cyrillic-based orthographies for many Caucasian languages, including Tabasaran.

Latin (1931–1938)

From 1931 to 1938, the Latin alphabet was used as a base for the Tabasaran writing system. The first book was published in 1932. Initially, the alphabet took the following form: a, b, c, cc, cь, ç, çь, d, e, ә, f, g, ƣ, h, i, j, k, kk, ⱪ, l, m, n, u, p, pp, ᶈ, q, ꝗ, r, s, ꟍ, ꟍꟍ, ş, şь, t, tt, t̨, y, v, x, ҳ, ӿ, z, ⱬ, zz, ƶ, ƶƶ, ƶь, ' Soon after, capital letters and the letters O o and Latin capital letter Z with stroke and descender

Latin capital letter Z with stroke and descender

Latin small letter Z with stroke and descender

were introduced. The alphabet then took the following form:

Cyrillic (1938–present)

Tabasaran has been written using

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

since 1938. Note: The letters indicated in orange are encountered only in loanwords from

Russian Russian(s) may refer to: *Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries *A citizen of Russia *Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages *''The Russians'', a b ...

Grammar

It is highly probable that Tabasaran is an active language of the fluid-S type.

Cases

Tabasaran was listed in the ''

Guinness Book of World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a British reference book published annually, listi ...

'' as having the largest

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

system in the world, with 48. Hjelmslev (1935) claimed that Tabasaran had the 'empirical maximum' number of cases, with 52 (though 2 occur only on adjectives). However, such claims are based on a sloppy analysis of 'case', and other languages such as Tsez would have even larger counts under such definitions. Comrie & Polinsky (1998) analyze the system as having 14 case morphemes (counting the absolutive with no suffix) in southern dialects (including the standard language) and 15 in northern dialects. These include 4 core/argument cases (absolutive, ergative, genitive -n and dative -z). The absolutive is the citation form. The ergative, which may be irregular but typically ends in -i, functions as the stem for all other cases. There are also 7 or 8 locative case suffixes: -ʔ 'in', -xy 'at', -h 'near / in front' (neutralized with 'at' in the south), -ʔin 'on' (horizontal), -k 'on' (vertical), -kk 'under', -q 'behind' and 'among'. The locative cases may take an additional suffix, allative -na or ablative -an, for 21 or 24 combinations. All of these, as well as the dative, can take a further suffix -di to mark the location as less specific, for 47 (southern) to 53 (northern) combinations of case suffixes.

Samples

''Uwu aldakurawu.'' "Уву алдакураву." — "You are falling." ''Uzuz uwu kkunduzuz.'' "Узуз уву ккундузуз." — "I love you." ''Uwu fudžuwa?'' "Уву фужува?" — "Who are you?" ''Fici wuna?'' "Фици вуна?" — "How are you?" ''Zakur ʕürza.'' "Закур гъюрза." — "I'll come tomorrow." ''Uzu kana qheza.'' "Узу кана хъэза." — "I'll be back."

References

*Chanmagomedov, B.G.-K. & K.T. Šalbuzov, ''Tabasaransko-russkij slovarʼ'', Moskva: Ilim, 2001, ncludes outline of Tabasaran grammar (Grammatičeskij očerk tabasaranskogo jazyka) by K.K. Kurbanov (p. 395-476)*Alekseev, Mixail E. and Sabrina X. Shixalieva. 2003. ''Tabasaranskij Jazyk''. Moskva: Nauka.

External links

Tabasaran dictionary online from IDS
(select simple or advanced browsing)
Entry in the Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire

Description at Languages of the World

Entry at the Rosetta Project

Tabasaran basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database

Tabasaran DoReCo corpus
compiled by Natalia Bogomolova, Dmitry Ganenkov and Nils Norman Schiborr. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and time-aligned morphological annotations. {{DEFAULTSORT:Tabasaran Language Agglutinative languages Lezgian languages Northeast Caucasian languages Languages of Russia Dagestan