Albisteak
«The Mountain of Languages»: minor languages of the Caucasus
The languages spoken in Caucasus belong mainly to three indigenous families: South Caucasian (or Kartvelian), West Caucasian (Abkhazo-Adyghean), and East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian), as well as to Turkic and Indo-European families.
The smallest language of the South Caucasian, Svan, is currently spoken by around 15,000-20,000 speakers, all bilingual in Georgian, and its transmission to the children is limited.
One of the Abkhaz-Adyghe languages, Ubykh, became extinct in the end of the XXth century. Among the living members, only Abaza counts as a minor language with its over 30,000 speakers. However, it enjoys an official status and wide oral and written usage, including in media (for example the Abazashta newspaper).
The most numerous family of the three is the East Caucasian. The Nakh branch includes Chechen and Ingush, official languages of the Republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia, as well as unwritten Batsbi spoken in a single village in Georgia. The 26 Daghestanian languages are spoken mostly in the mountainous part of the Republic of Daghestan, as well as in neighbouring areas of Georgia and Azerbaijan. People living there typically speak at least three or four languages -their mother tongue, the language(s) of the closest neighbours and of the nearest town, and Russian (or Georgian or Azeri, respectively). Apart from five major languages with written tradition (Avar, Dargwa, Lak, Lezgian, Tabasaran), all the others are to a greater or lesser extent endangered.
Many Daghestanian languages occupy a very small territory, and several -such as Archi, Godoberi or Khinalug - are only spoken in a single village. Such remote highland villages may have kept a relatively stable population of just a thousand people for centuries. Nowadays, the situation changes fast. It often seems that the vitality of a language is inversely related to the accessibility of the region (the roads have always been a problem; for example there were no winter road to Khinalug until 2000s). As it becomes easier to come to a place, it also becomes easier to leave. Young people tend to move to lowland villages and big cities. The children raised there most often do not speak the language of their grandparents.
Alexandre Arkhipov
Linguist
