Hunzib is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the Hunzib 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 Ca ...

,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-ei ...

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 the ...

Classification

Hunzib belongs to the Tsezic group of the

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 in ...

. 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 Sul ...

districts of

and in two villages across the Russian border in

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 ...

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 noun ...

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 classes: male, female, and three classes for inanimate objects. There are a number of cases in Hunzib, including the absolutive, ergative,

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 a ...

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 inst ...

. 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'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, ergative,

, and

. 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 Jacob ...

and

adessive In grammar, an adessive case (abbreviated ; from Latin '' adesse'' "to be present (at)": ''ad'' "at" + ''esse'' "to be") is a grammatical case generally denoting location at, upon, or adjacent to the referent of the noun; the term is most frequentl ...

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.

Word order

Hunzib usually follows a subject–object–verb word order.

References

External links

Hunzib basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hunzib Language Agglutinative languages Northeast Caucasian languages Languages of Russia Dagestan Endangered Caucasian languages