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The 'Chechen language' (Нохчийн мотт / Noxçiyn mott) (Medieval Chechen: 'نوًچین موت') is spoken by more than 1.3 million people, mostly in Chechnya and by Chechen people elsewhere.

Contents

Classification

Geographic distribution

Official status

Dialects

Sounds

Consonants

Vowels

Grammar

Vocabulary

History

References

External links

Classification

Chechen 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.

Geographic distribution

According to the Russian Census in October 2002, 1,330,000 people reported being able to speak Chechen.
Ethnologue estimates the total number worldwide as about 955,000, based on 945,000 speakers in Russia (as per 1989 census), and the estimated speaker count in the Chechen diaspora in the Middle East countries, especially Jordan.^[1]

Official status

Chechen is an official language of Chechnya.

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 Salishan languages of Northern America and a large vowel system resembling Swedish or German.

Consonants

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. Typically of the region, a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless and ejective stops is found.

	Labial	Dental	Postalveolar	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal	Glottal
Nasal
Plosive
Affricate
Fricative	[2]
Rhotic		[3]
Approximant

The phoneme is realized as before front vowels.

Vowels

Unlike most other languages of the Caucasus, Chechen 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 so far have distinguished the vowels with complete accuracy.

front unrounded	front rounded	central	back

Grammar

Chechen nouns belong to one of several genders or classes (6), each with a specific prefix with which the verb agrees, there is extensive case marking and postpositions. The verb agrees with class/gender but not with person number, having only tense forms and participles. Chechen is an ergative language, thus the verb agrees with either its direct object or with its intransitive subject.
Nominal declensions are also extensive - the language uses 8 cases.
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

There are borrowings from Russian, Turkic languages (mostly from Kumyk), Arabic, as well as some from Persian, and Georgian.

History

Before the Russian conquest, most of writing in Chechnya were Islamic texts and clan histories, written usually in Arabic but sometimes also in Chechen using Arabic script. Those texts have been largely destroyed by Soviet authorities in 1944.^[4] 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, in order to tie the nation closer to Russians. With the declaration of the Chechen republic in 1992, some Chechen speakers returned to the Latin alphabet.The use of this alphabet in Chechen is politically significant (as Russia prefers the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, against the separatists' preference for Latin).
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.

References

1. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=che
2. is found only in European loanwords
3. is a tap [] according to some sources (http://ingush.narod.ru/chech/book/ch0405.gif) and a trill for others (Chechen-English, English-Chechen Dictionary by Nicholas Awde and Muhammad Galaev)
4. http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Echechen/Ch_writing.htm

External links

★ 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.