– more than 40 indigenous languages of the Caucasus region, not related to any language families outside the region. The total number of speakers of these languages is more than 7 million, of which about 50% are Georgians and more than 10% are Chechens. Speakers of some Caucasian languages also live in Turkey and some other Middle Eastern states, but they appeared there as a result of late migratory processes and use hindi to english translation app.
For a long time, the autochthonous languages of the Caucasus were considered to form a genetic unity, for which the term “Iberian-Caucasian languages” was used. At present, the prevailing view is that the Aborigines of the Caucasus speak languages of three different language families: the Kartvelian, or South Caucasian (Georgian and three other small languages); the Abkhaz-Adygian, or Northwestern (five languages, divided into two branches: Abkhazian – Abkhazian, Abazinian and Ubykh, the latter common in Turkey
– and Adygian – Adygean and Kabardino-Circassian, the latter being the largest in number within the family; the total number of speakers of the Abkhaz-Adygian exceeds 700,000 The largest languages are Chechen, Avar, Lezgin, Dargin, Ingush and Lak, with a total number of speakers exceeding 2.3 million people). The hypothesis of I.M.Dyakonov and S.A.Starostin about the relationship of the NakhDagestani languages with the ancient Hurrian and Urartian has many proponents. The North Caucasian macrofamily includes the AbkhazoAdyg and Nakh-Dagestani languages, which belong to the Sino-Caucasian superfamily according to the hypothesis of long-range linguistic affinity mentioned above, while the Kartvelian languages belong to the Nostratic superfamily after V.M. Illich-Svitich’s works.
linguistically, the Caucasian languages differ sharply from all other languages of this part of the world, and, despite the lack of kinship, there are certain features of similarity between them, forcing to speak of the Caucasian language union. Their typical features are: the relative simplicity of vowel system (in Ubykhian there are only two, which is a world record) and unusual variety of consonants; predominantly agglutinative morphology; wide spread of ergative syntax. Only Georgian language has a written tradition (and very long – since 5th century A.D.).
The Caucasus is also inhabited by Indo-European languages (isolated Armenian; Iranian Ossetian, Kurdish, Tat, Talysh; Russian) and Turkic (Azerbaijani, Karachai-Balkar, Nogai); close to the Caucasus is also Kalmykia, whose titular ethnos is Mongolian speaking.
