Table of Contents
Why is the Caucasian family of languages unique?
The Caucasian Family family is named after the Caucas Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. This is a very linguistically diverse region. The languages include Georgian (Georgia), Chechen and Ingush (both found in Chechnya in southern Russia), and Avar (9 dialects from a region called Dagetsan).
What language do people in the Caucasus speak?
The predominant Indo-European language in the Caucasus is Armenian, spoken by the Armenians (circa 6,7 million speakers). The Ossetians, speaking the Ossetian language, form another group of around 700,000 speakers.
How many languages are in the Caucasus?
The almost 50 languages spoken in the Caucasus are divided into five different language families: the Kartvelian, the Northeast Caucasian, the Northwest Caucasian, the Indo-European and the Turkic languages.
Where do Caucasian languages come from?
Caucasian languages, also called Paleo-Caucasian, or Ibero-Caucasian, group of languages indigenous to Transcaucasia and adjacent areas of the Caucasus region, between the Black and Caspian seas.
What language family does Arabic belong to?
Semitic family
Arabic, which first emerged in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula, is a member of the Semitic family of languages which also includes Hebrew and Aramaic.
Are Caucasian languages Indo European?
Connections to Indo-European It has been conjectured that the North-West Caucasian languages may be genetically related to the Indo-European family, at a time depth of perhaps 12,000 years before the present. This hypothesised proto-language is called Proto-Pontic, but is not widely accepted.
What language do they speak in the Caucasus?
The predominant Indo-European language in the Caucasus is Armenian, spoken by the Armenians (circa 4 million speakers). The Ossetians, speaking the Ossetian language, form another group of around 700,000 speakers.
What is the North Caucasian family of languages?
Linguists such as Sergei Starostin see the Northeast (Nakh-Dagestanian) and Northwest (Abkhaz–Adyghe) families as related and propose uniting them in a single North Caucasian family, sometimes called Caucasic or simply Caucasian. This theory excludes the South Caucasian languages, thereby proposing two indigenous language families.
How many people in the world speak Caucasian languages?
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, Svan, Mingrelian and Laz.
What is the Dené–Caucasian macrofamily?
Linguists such as Sergei Starostin have proposed a Dené–Caucasian macrofamily, which includes the North Caucasian languages together with Basque, Burushaski, Na-Dené, Sino-Tibetan, and Yeniseian. This proposal is rejected by most linguists.