Chechen language

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The Chechen language has about 1,200,000 speakers, most of whom live in Chechnya.

Contents

1 Classification
2 Geographic distribution

2.1 Official status
2.2 Dialects

3 Sounds
4 Grammar
5 Vocabulary
6 History
7 External links

Classification

The Chechen language is one of the languages of the Caucasus. Linguistically, it is a member of the Nakh family, together with Ingush and Bats; they all belong to the Northeast Caucasian languages with only Ingush and Chechen being mutually intelligible.

Languages indigenous to the Caucasus are not members of any language families spoken elsewhere in the world.

Geographic distribution

Chechen is spoken by about 950,000, in Chechnya and (due to the Chechen diaspora) Middle East countries, especially Jordan.

Official status

Chechen is an official language of Chechnya, an autonomous republic of Russia.

Dialects

There are a number of Chechen dialects:

Ploskost
Itumkala (Shatoi)
Melkhin
Kistin
Cheberloi
Akkin (Aux)

Sounds

Some characteristics of Chechen include its wealth of consonants and sounds similar to Arabic or Native American languages, a large vowel system resembling Swedish or German, four grammatical genders, and a complex phrase structure.

The Chechen language has (like most indigenous languages of the Caucasus) a large number of consonants: about 31 (depending on the dialect and the analysis), more than for most languages of Europe. Unlike most other languages of the Caucasus, it also has an extensive inventory of vowels and diphthongs: about 27 (depending on dialect and analysis), similar in number and phonetics to the vowel systems of the Scandinavian languages, German, and Finnish. None of the spelling systems used for Chechen so far have distinguished the vowels with complete accuracy.

Grammar

Chechen also presents interesting challenges for lexicography, as creating new words in the language relies on fixation of whole phrases rather than adding to the end of existing words or combining existing words. It can be difficult to decide which phrases belong in the dictionary.

Vocabulary

Native Chechen words are few in number (not more than 3000). There are many borrowings from Russian, Turkic languages (mostly from Kumyk), Arabic, as well as some from Persian, Alanian (Ossetic), and Georgian. Chechen and Ingush scholars have found links to the ancient cuneiform languages Hurrian and Urartian.

History

The Chechen literary language was created after the October Revolution, and the Latin alphabet began to be used instead of Arabic for Chechen writing in the mid-1920s. In 1938, the Cyrillic alphabet was adopted. With the declaration of the Chechen republic in 1992, some Chechen speakers returned to the Latin alphabet. The Chechen diaspora in Jordan, Turkey and Syria is fluent but generally not literate in Chechen except for individuals who have made efforts to learn the writing system, and of course the Cyrillic alphabet is not generally known in these countries.

External links

[ {{{1] of Wikipedia

[Ethnologue report for Chechen]
[Rosetta Project entry for Chechen (includes word list)]
[Indigenous Language of the Caucasus (Chechen), grammatical sketch of Chechen language]
[The Cyrillic and Latin Chechen alphabets]
[The Chechen language | Noxchiin mott] Wealth of linguistic information.

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