The Hinukh ( Hinukh: гьинухъес ''hinuqes'', ) are a people 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 ...

living in 2 villages: Genukh, Tsuntinsky District, their "parent village"; and Novomonastyrskoe, Kizlyarsky District where they settled later and live together with Avars and

Dargins Dargins or Dargwa (, ''darganti'') are a Northeast Caucasian native ethnic group originating in the North Caucasus, and who make up the second largest ethnic group in the North Caucasian republic of Dagestan. They speak the various Dargin lang ...

and also in the cities of

. They are being assimilated by the Caucasian Avars.

History

The Hinukh ethnonym "''hinukh''" comes from the word ''hino''/''hinu'', "the road" (

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

''-kh''/''-kho'' form essive case "at the road", "on the road"). The Bezhta people call them "гьинухъаса" (''hinukhasa''), the

Georgians Georgians, or Kartvelians (; ka, ქართველები, tr, ), are a nation and Peoples of the Caucasus, Caucasian ethnic group native to present-day Georgia (country), Georgia and surrounding areas historically associated with the Ge ...

"ლეკები" (''lekebi'') or "დიდოელები" (''didoelebi''), and the Tsez people "гьинузи" (''hinuzi''). In the official documents and the censuses the Hinukh did not appear as an independent ethnic group. After the forcible deportation of the Vainakh people and disbandment of the Chechen–Ingush ASSR, they were (together with some other Avar–Andi–Dido peoples) resettled in Vedensky District which was given to

Dagestan ASSR The Dagestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1921–1991), abbreviated as Dagestan ASSR or DASSR and also unofficially known as Soviet Dagestan or just simply Dagestan, was an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR within the Soviet Union ...

. After the rehabilitation of the

Vainakh peoples The Nakh peoples are a group of North Caucasian languages, North Caucasian peoples identified by their use of the Nakh languages and other cultural similarities. These are chiefly the ethnic Chechen people, Chechen, Ingush people, Ingush and Ba ...

in 1958 they settled back in their native lands. In 1960s the population of the Hinukh people was estimated to be 200.

2002 Russian Census The 2002 Russian census () was the first census of the Russian Federation since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, carried out on October 9 through October 16, 2002. It was carried out by the Russian Federal Service of State Statistics (Rossta ...

showed their number as 531. They were considered as a subgroup of Avar people in this census.

2021 Russian census The 2021 Russian census () was the first census of the Russia, Russian Federation population since 2010 Russian census, 2010 and the third after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, dissolution of the Soviet Union. It took place between October 1 ...

registered 630 Hinukh, nearly all living in

Genetics

According to genetic studies in 2016, the following haplogroups are found to predominate among Hinukh: * J1 (56%) * G2 (44%)

Religion

The Hinukh people are overwhelmingly

Sunni Muslims Sunni Islam is the largest branch of Islam and the largest religious denomination in the world. It holds that Muhammad did not appoint any successor and that his closest companion Abu Bakr () rightfully succeeded him as the caliph of the Musli ...

. They converted to Islam possibly in the late 18th century, through the

mountain guides A mountain guide is a specially trained and experienced professional mountaineer who is certified by local authorities or mountain guide associations. They are considered to be high-level experts in mountaineering, and are hired to instruct or ...

from the Free Community of Gidatl and Khunzakh and the Bezhta people, who were already

Muslims Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...

Language

The Hinukh language is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Tsezic subgroup. Beside their native Hinukh language, many also speak Avar, Tsez,

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 ...

and often also other languages of the region. The first information about Archi language was in a letter from Peter von Uslar to Franz Anton Schiefner dated 1865, where he writes about a special language in Inukho '' aul'' (''i.e.'' Hinukh). The first written material about Hinukh language was a list of 16 words with their counterparts in Tsez language, given by the Belarusian ethnographer and folklorist Aleksandr Serzhputovkiy in his work about the Tsez people in 1916. Linguist

Nicholas Marr Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr (, ''Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr''; , ''Nikoloz Iak'obis dze Mari''; — 20 December 1934) was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking o ...

classified Hinukh language as an independent language, but erroneously described it as a language "between Avar and

Dido Dido ( ; , ), also known as Elissa ( , ), was the legendary founder and first queen of the Phoenician city-state of Carthage (located in Tunisia), in 814 BC. In most accounts, she was the queen of the Phoenician city-state of Tyre (located ...

languages". It was classified as a dialect of the Tsez language by the linguists D.S. Imnaishvili and E.S. Lomtadze. The Hinukh people and Hinukh language were not in the list of the ethnic groups and languages of

for a long time. They appeared only in the second edition of the ''

Great Soviet Encyclopedia The ''Great Soviet Encyclopedia'' (GSE; , ''BSE'') is one of the largest Russian-language encyclopedias, published in the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1990. After 2002, the encyclopedia's data was partially included into the later ''Great Russian Enc ...

''.

References

*Wixman, Ron. ''Peoples of the USSR''. p. 74. {{Ethnic groups of Russia Ethnic groups in Dagestan Muslim communities of Russia Peoples of the Caucasus Muslim communities of the Caucasus