Abkhaz language Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

Abkhaz is an agglutinative language spoken in Georgia (in autonomous republic of Abkhazia) and Turkey. Abkhaz has about 100,000 speakers in Abkhazia, with up to 500,000 more living in northeastern Turkey. It belongs to the northwest Caucasian family spoken by only the Abazins, Adyghey, Kabardians and Circassians.

Abkhaz is often claimed to be simply a divergent dialect of a larger language, Abkhaz-Abaza. It makes better linguistic sense, however, to separate Abkhaz and Abaza into two separate languages. Abkhaz is generally viewed as having three major dialects, Abzhuy, Bzyp (the Caucasian dialects) and Sadz (in Turkey).

Abkhaz is characterised by unusual consonant clusters and a small vowel inventory. It has only two distinctive vowels: an open vowel /a/ and a close vowel /ı, ǝ/. Depending on the environment both of the vowels can be realized as [e,i,o,u]. Abzhuy Abkhaz has 58 consonants, whereas Bzyp has 67.

The first fragments of Abkhazian language that we have were taken down in the Arabic alphabet by the Turkish traveller Evliya Celebi in the 11th century. Abkhaz has only been a full literary language for about 100 years, and during the Stalinist Russian years Abkhaz was banned as a literary language.

Abkhaz has its own alphabet since 1862. The first alphabet was a 37 character Cyrillic alphabet invented by Baron Peter von Uslar. In 1909 a 55 letter Cyrillic alphabet was used. A 75-letter Latin script devised by Nikolai Marr lasted from 1926 to 1928, when another Latin script was used. The Georgian script was imposed in 1937, but an Abkhaz desire to remain separate from Georgians led to the development of the current Cyrillic alphabet in 1954.

Sounds

Like the other Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz is very rich in consonants, but has only a few vowels. Below is the Abkhaz X-SAMPA phoneme chart, for the standard dialect; the Bzyb dialect has even more consonants.

• Labials: p p_> b v f w m
• Dentals: t t_> d n
• Labialized dentals: t_w t_>_w d_w
• Alveolar sibilants: ts ts_> dz s z
• Labialized alveolar sibilants: ts_w ts_>_w dz_w
• Palatalized alveolar sibilants: ts_j ts_>_j dz_j s_j z_j
• Postalveolar sibilants: tS tS_> dZ S Z
• Labialized postalveolar sibilants: tS_w dZ_w
• Lateral: l
• Rhotic trill: r
• Palatals: k_j k_>_j g_j j
• Velars: k k_> g
• Uvulars: q_> X R
• Palatized uvulars: q_>_j X_j R_j
• Labialized uvulars: q_>_w X_w R_w
• Pharyngeals: X\\ X\\_w
• Labiopalatal semivowel: H (< ?\\_w, a labialized voiced pharyngeal fricative)
• Vowels: @ a (with allophones [i] and [e] next to palatals, [o] and [u] next to labials)

External links

• Ethnologue entry for Abkhaz

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