Akhvakh language


The Akhvakh language is a Northeast Caucasian language from the Avar–Andic branch. Ethnologue lists 6500 speakers, but Magomedova and Abulaeva list 20,000 speakers of the language. Akhvakh has several dialects, though sources do not agree on the number. Ethnologue lists Kaxib, Northern Akhvakh and Southern Akhvakh. Creissels lists Northern Akhvakh and three dialects of Southern Akhvakh.
A few publications have been made in the Akhvakh language, but for the most part speakers of Akhvakh have adopted Avar as their literary language.

Phonology

Consonants

As with Avar, there are competing analyses of the distinction transcribed in the table with the length sign. Length is part of the distinction, but so is articulatory strength, so they have been analyzed as fortis and lenis. The fortis affricates are long in the fricative part of the contour, e.g. , not in the stop part as in geminate affricates in languages such as Japanese and Italian . Laver analyzes e.g. as a two-segment affricate-fricative sequence .

Grammar

Agreement classes

Akhvakh has three agreement classes. In the singular, these are human masculine, human feminine, and non-human. In the plural, there are only two—human plural and non-human plural. Akhvakh verbs agree with the absolutive argument
Consider the following examples, which show the general principles. In the first example, the intransitive verb 'run' shows feminine agreement because its subject, 'girl', is feminine. In the second example, the transitive verb 'cook' shows neuter agreement because its object, 'meat', is neuter.
Note that in the second example, 'wife' is in the ergative case and appears to be the subject of both the verbs 'cook' and 'eat', but neither verb shows feminine agreement.

Cases

Akhvakh has an ergative-absolutive case-marking system. As the following examples show, the transitive subject has the ergative case, while an intransitive subject has absolutive case. Absolutive case is not overtly marked by a suffix, but the noun phrase with absolutive case controls agreement on the verb:
In addition to the ergative and absolutive cases, Akhvakh has eighteen other cases, for a total of twenty cases. The additional cases are