Avar (магӏарул мацӏ,, "language of the mountains" or авар мацӏ, , "Avar language"), also known as Avaric, is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Avar–Andic subgroup that is spoken by Avars, primarily in Dagestan. In 2010, there were approximately one million speakers in Dagestan and elsewhere in Russia.

Geographic distribution

It is spoken mainly in the western and southern parts of the Russian Caucasus republic of Dagestan, and the Balaken, Zaqatala regions of north-western Azerbaijan. Some Avars live in other regions of Russia. There are also small communities of speakers living in the Russian republics of Chechnya and Kalmykia; in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Jordan, and the Marmara Sea region of Turkey. It is spoken by about 1,200,000 people worldwide. UNESCO classifies Avar as vulnerable to extinction.

Status

It is one of six literary languages of Dagestan, where it is spoken not only by the Avar, but also serves as the language of communication between different ethnic and linguistic groups.

Dialects

Glottolog lists 14 dialects of Avar, some of which correspond to the villages where they are spoken. The dialects are listed in alphabetical order based on their name in Glottolog:

Phonology

There are competing analyses of the distinction transcribed in the table with the length sign ⟨ː⟩. 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. (tss), not in the stop part as in geminate affricates in languages such as Japanese and Italian (tts). Laver (1994) analyzes e.g. as a two-segment affricate–fricative sequence [] ( = ). Avar has five phonemic vowels: /a e i o u/.

Lexical accent

In Avar, accent is contrastive, free and mobile, independent of the number of syllables in the word. Changes in lexical accent placement indicate different semantic meaning and grammatical meanings of a word:

Morphosyntax

Avar is an agglutinative language, of SOV order. Adverbs do not inflect, outside of inflection for noun class in some adverbs of place: e.g. the in "inside" and "in front". Adverbs of place also distinguish locative, allative, and ablative forms suffixally, such as "inside", "to the inside", and "from the inside". is an emphatic suffix taken by underived adjectives.

Writing systems

There were some attempts to write the Avar language in the Georgian alphabet as early as the 14th century. The use of Arabic script for representing Avar in marginal glosses began in the 15th century. The use of Arabic, which is known as ajam, is still known today. Peter von Uslar developed a Cyrillic-based alphabet, published in 1889, that also used some Georgian-based letters. Many of its letters have not been encoded in Unicode. The alphabet takes the following form: а б в г ӷ д е ж һ і ј к қ л м н о п ԛ р с ҫ т ҭ у х х̓ хّ ц ц̓ ꚑ ч ч̍ чّ /ч̓ ш ƞ ƞ̓ ɳّ ດ As part of Soviet language re-education policies in 1928 the Ajam was replaced by a Latin alphabet, which in 1938 was in turn replaced by the current Cyrillic script. Essentially, it is the Russian alphabet plus one additional letter called palochka (stick, Ӏ). As that letter cannot be typed with common keyboard layouts, it is often replaced with a capital Latin letter i ( I ), small Latin letter L ( l ), or the numerical digit 1.

Current orthography

The Avar language is usually written in the Cyrillic script. The letters of the alphabet are (with their pronunciation given below in IPA transcription):

Comparison chart

Compiled according to:

Arabic writing conventions

One feature of Avar Arabic script is that similar to alphabets such as Uyghur and Kurdish, the script does not omit vowels and does not rely on diacritics to represent vowels when need be. Instead, modified letters with dot placement and accents have been standardized to represent vowels. Thus, Avar Arabic script is no longer an "impure abjad" unlike its parent systems (Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman), it now resembles a proper "alphabet". While this was not the case for most of the several centuries during which Arabic alphabet has been used for Avar, this has become the case in the latest and most common conventions. This was indeed not the case at the time of writing of a linguistic article for the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1881. As an example, in Avar Arabic Script, four varieties of the letter yāʼ ("ی") have been developed, each with a distinct function. Nevertheless, Avar Arabic script does retain two diacritics. First is "shadda" (ـّـ), used for gemination. While in Cyrillic, two back to back letters, including digraphs are written, in Arabic script, shadda is used. Second diacritic in use in Avar Arabic script is ḍammah (ـُـ). In Arabic, Persian, and historically in Ottoman Turkish, this diacritic is used to represent [o] or [u]. But in Avar, this diacritic is used for labialization [◌ʷ] and not for any sort of vowel. So, it is the case that this diacritic is used in conjunction with a follow-up vowel. For example, the sound "зва" [zʷa] is written as "زُا". This diacritic can optionally be used in conjunction with shadda. For example, the sound "ссвa" [sːʷa] is written as "سُّا". If a word starts with a vowel, if it's an [a] sound, it is written with alif "ا". Otherwise, the vowel needs to be preceded by a "vowel carrier", which is hamza-ya' (ئـ). No need for such a carrier in the middle of words. Below table demonstrates vowels in Avar Arabic Script.

Sample comparison

Literature

The literary language is based on the болмацӏ (bolmacʼ)—bo = "army" or "country", and macʼ = "language"—the common language used between speakers of different dialects and languages. The bolmacʼ in turn was mainly derived from the dialect of Khunzakh, the capital and cultural centre of the Avar region, with some influence from the southern dialects. Nowadays the literary language is influencing the dialects, levelling out their differences. The most famous figure of modern Avar literature is Rasul Gamzatov (died November 3, 2003), the People's Poet of Dagestan. Translations of his works into Russian have gained him a wide audience all over the former Soviet Union.

Sample sentences

Sample text