Hunzib people
The Hunzibs are an indigenous people of Dagestan, North Caucasia living in three villages in the Tsuntinsky District in the upper regions of the Avar-Koysu river area. They have their own language, Hunzib, and primarily follow Sunni Islam
...
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 ...
,Ethnologue entry for Hunzib /ref> near the
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eigh ...
n border with
Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to t ...
Northeast Caucasian languages
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as ...
. It is most closely related to Bezhta and Khwarshi, according to the latest research.The Languages of the Caucasus, by Wolfgang Schulze (2009) /ref> Other Tsezic languages include Tsez and Hinukh. Khwarshi was previously grouped together with Tsez and Hinukh instead of with Hunzib.
Geographic distribution
Hunzib is not an official language, nor is it written. It is spoken in the Tsunta and
Kizilyurt
Kizilyurt (russian: Кизилю́рт; av, Гъизилюрт; kum, Къызыл-юрт, ''Qızıl-yurt'') is a town in the Republic of Dagestan, Russia, about northwest of Makhachkala. Population: . It is located where the north-flowing Sulak ...
districts 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 ...
and in two villages across the Russian border in
Georgia
Georgia most commonly refers to:
* Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia
* Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States
Georgia may also refer to:
Places
Historical states and entities
* Related to t ...
.
Phonology
Vowels
Vowels in Hunzib may be short, long, or nasalized.
Consonants
Hunzib has 35 consonants. Three consonants, , , and , are only found in
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...
s.
Grammar
Gender
Like a number of other Northeast Caucasian languages, Hunzib has a
grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all nouns ...
system with five classes. The first classes, I and II mark male and female rationals, respectively, while the remaining classes mark non-humans. Gender marking is covert on nouns, but appears in agreement on verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and adverbial constructions.
# When preceding a nasalized vowel, class markers b- and r- surface as m- and n- respectively.
Nouns
Nouns in Hunzib come in five
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: male, female, and three classes for inanimate objects. There are a number of cases in Hunzib, including the
absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...
genitive
In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...
,
instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instr ...
. A number of other case-like markers indicate direction and include dative, adessive, superessive, contactive, comitative and allative declensions. The following are taken from
Helma van den Berg
Helma Everdina van den Berg (May 26, 1965 – November 11, 2003) was a Dutch-born linguist specializing in Caucasian languages.
Life and work
Van den Berg was born and raised in Veenendaal, the Netherlands. She earned her PhD from Leiden Un ...
's ''A Grammar of Hunzib''.Berg, Helma van den, ''A Grammar of Hunzib (with Texts and Lexicon)'' (Lincom Europa, München 1995) .
Case
Hunzib has four basic grammatical cases, the
absolutive
In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative� ...
genitive
In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can ...
, and
instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to instr ...
. The absolutive case is formed from the base stem, and the other cases are formed from the oblique stem.
# After vowels
# After consonants
Hunzib also has a series of local cases, where localizations are combined with directional suffixes. The
dative
In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jaco ...
and adessive cases have syntactic functions as well, but are morphologically local.
# The vowel in these forms will be a duplicate of the vowel in the syllable to which it attaches.
Oblique stem
Cases other than the absolutive are formed by attaching the relevant case marker to an oblique stem, which is often the base stem plus some lexically determined extension.
Some nouns (around 7%) do not use any extension and the oblique and base stems are identical. These words generally end in a vowel, like ''"father"'' ABS ''ɑbu'', GEN ''ɑbu-s''. A small number of Hunzib nouns exhibit stem alternation, like ''"moon"'' ABS ''boo'', GEN ''bɨə''.
Verbs
Most verbs agree in class and number with the noun in the phrase that is in the absolutive case. As Hunzib has ergative alignment, that equals the subject of intransitive sentences and the direct object of transitive sentences.