Ubykh Language
Ubykh or Ubyx is an extinct language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people (who originally lived along the eastern coast of the Black Sea before migrating en masse to Turkey in the 1860s). The language's last native speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died in 1992.
The Ubykh language is ergative and agglutinative, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants, but only two distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants it has one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, the largest number for any language without clicks.
The name Ubykh is derived from /wəbəx/, its name in the Abdzakh Adyghe (Circassian) language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Ubıh (Turkish) and Oubykh (French); and Pekhi (from Ubykh /tʷaχə/) and its Germanised variant Päkhy.
Read more about Ubykh Language: Major Features, Orthography, Evolution, History
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“Language is an archeological vehicle ... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.”
—Russell Hoban (b. 1925)