Families Indigenous To The Caucasus
Three of these families have no current members outside the Caucasus, and are considered indigenous to the area. The term Caucasian languages is generally restricted to these families, which are spoken by about 11.2 million people.
- Kartvelian language family with a total of about 5.2 million speakers. Includes Georgian, the official language of Georgia, with four million speakers, Mingrelian, Laz language and Svan language.
- Northwest Caucasian, also called the Abkhaz–Adyghe, Circassian, or Pontic family, with a total of about 2.5 million speakers. Includes the Kabardian language, with one million speakers.
- Northeast Caucasian, also called the Dagestanian, Nakho-Dagestanian, or Caspian family, with a total of about 3.5 million speakers. Includes the Chechen language with 1.5 million speakers, the Avar language with 1 million speakers, the Ingush language with 500,000 speakers, the Lezgian language and others.
It is commonly believed that all Caucasian languages have a large number of consonants. While this is certainly true for most members of the Northwest and Northeast Caucasian families (inventories range up to the 80–84 consonants of Ubykh), the consonant inventories of the South Caucasian languages are not nearly as extensive, ranging from 28 (Georgian) to 30 (Laz) – comparable to languages like Arabic (28 consonants), Western European languages (20–21), and Russian (35–37 consonants).
The autochthonous languages of the Caucasus share some areal features, such as the presence of ejective consonants and a highly agglutinative structure, and, with the sole exception of Mingrelian, all of them exhibit a greater or lesser degree of ergativity. Many of these features are shared with other languages that have been in the Caucasus for a long time, such as Ossetian.
Read more about this topic: Languages Of The Caucasus
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