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date: 06 July 2022

Abstract and Keywords

The chapter is a survey of the Nakh-Daghestanian family (also known as East Caucasian), one of the indigenous language families spoken in the Caucasus. The family comprises more than 30 languages, some of which are spoken by only a few hundred people and remain unwritten and/or underdescribed. The chapter provides general information about the sociolinguistic status of Nakh-Daghestanian languages and the history of their research as well as their phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. The languages of the family have rich consonant systems and are morphologically ergative, head-final, with rich case systems, complex verbal paradigms, and pervasive gender-number agreement. Alongside the major transitive and intransitive lexical verb classes, verbs of perception and cognition with the dative experiencer subject usually comprise one or more minor valency classes with non-canonically marked subjects. Among valency-increasing derivations, the causative is the most prominent. The most typical subordination strategies are non-finite, making use of participles, converbs, infinitives and verbal nouns.

Keywords: Nakh-Dagestanian, grammar, phonology, morphology, syntax, ergativity, SOV

Dmitry Ganenkov

Dmitry Ganenkov is a Research Fellow in the Department of English and American Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a Senior Research Fellow at the Laboratory for Languages of the Caucasus at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. He received his PhD in Linguistics in 2005 from Moscow State University. His work focuses on documentation, description, and syntactic analysis of Nakh-Dagestanian languages. His theoretical interests include ergativity, agreement, binding, and obligatory control.

Timur Maisak

Timur Maisak is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Research Fellow at the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory of the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. He obtained his PhD in Linguistics from Moscow State University in 2002. He has conducted research on Nakh-Dagestanian languages since the 1990s, mainly on the Lezgic and Andic branches of the family. His research interests include language documentation and description, typology of verbal categories, and grammaticalization theory.

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