Chirag (Chirag: ''xarʁnilla kub'') is a language in the
Dargin dialect continuum spoken in
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 ...
,
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 ...
. It is often considered a divergent dialect of
Dargwa.
Ethnologue 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.Kaitag Kaitak, Kajtak, or Kaitag may refer to the following topics associated with a region in Dagestan, Russia:
* Kaitag State, a historic principality
* Kaytagsky District, the current administrative unit
* Kaitags, an ethnic group
* Kaitak language, ...
; within the South group, it has 84% lexical similarity with Qunqi Amuq.
Phonology
Vowels
Chirag has four vowels: , , , and .
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').
Grammar
Chirag is head-final
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the ...
, 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 single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a tra ...
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:
References
External links
* ELAR archive o
Chirag Documentation Project
{{Languages of the Caucasus
Northeast Caucasian languages