Saturday, February 7, 2009

What Languages Are Harder - Adyg, Wainakh, or Daghestanian?

The languages of the Caucasus language family can be divided into the three groups:
1. Western group (Abhaz-Adyg)
2. Eastern group (Nakh-Dagestanian)
3. Southern group (Kartvelian)

The first two groups are the Northern Caucasus languages. Most of them are spoken in the Russian part of the Caucasus. The languages of the third group are spoken in Georgia. Other Caucasus languages do not belong to the Caucasus language family.

Western group is divided into three subgroups:
1. Adyg languages: Kabardian language (or dialect) and Adygean language (or Chimtoy dialect)
2. Abhaz and Abaza languages which are quite similar
3. Ubykh language which is reportedly dead

Eastern group includes:
1. Nakh (Wainakh) languages: Chechen and Ingush languages (or dialects) and Batsbi language
2. Dagestanian languages: 26 languages spoken in Dagestan

Southern group includes Georgian and 3 other languages spoken in Georgia. There are some debates whether this group should be included into the Caucasus languge family or should be considered as a separate language family.

The Eastern Caucasus languages have many cases. This is one of their main difficulty. Because of this reason, some linguists consider Tabasaran language as the hardest in the Caucasus. However, as I wrote in the previous post, Chechen language has no less cases. Other Dagestanian languages have less cases.

The Western Caucasus languages have much less cases. Adyg languages have 4 cases. Comparing this number with 46 cases in Tabasaran, it seems that they are much more simple. However, Adyg languages have very complicated system of the verb forms. Adyg verbs have special prefixes for subjects, direct and indirect objects. Actually, Tabasaran languages also have them. However, Adyg verbs also distinguish grammatically dynamic and static, complete and incomplete actions, and many more action aspects. One verb can contain the meaning of the whole sentence and have 10 - 15 prefixes and suffixes. This makes Adyg verbs very complicated.

In conclusion, it seems that it is hard to define which of the Northern Caucasus languages is the hardest since they have all different difficulties.