Language Classification
A long-time classification divided the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, whence the term Nakho-Dagestanian. However, attempts at reconstructing the protolanguage suggest that the Nakh languages are no more divergent from Dagestanian than the various branches of Dagestanian are from each other, although this is still not universally accepted. The following outline, based on the work of linguist Bernard Comrie and others, has been adopted by Ethnologue. Population data is from Ethnologue 16th ed.
Read more about this topic: Northeast Caucasian Languages
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)