Aghul language

Aghul is a Lezgic language spoken by the Aghuls in southern Dagestan, Russia and in Azerbaijan. It is spoken by about 33,200 people (2020 census).

Aghul belongs to the Eastern Samur group of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family.

In 2002, Aghul was spoken by 28,300 people in Russia, mainly in Southern Dagestan, as well as 32 people in Azerbaijan.

There are nine languages in the Lezgian language family, namely: Aghul, Tabasaran, Rutul, Lezgian, Tsakhur, Budukh, Kryts, Udi and Archi.

Aghul has contrastive epiglottal consonants. Aghul makes, like many Northeast Caucasian languages, a distinction between tense consonants with concomitant length and weak consonants. The tense consonants are characterized by the intensiveness (tension) of articulation, which naturally leads to a lengthening of the consonant, so they are traditionally transcribed with the length diacritic. The gemination of the consonant itself does not create its tension, but morphologically tense consonants often derive from adjoining two single weak consonants. Some^[which?] Aghul dialects have a large number^[vague] of permitted initial tense consonants.

• The glottal stop transcribed here is named rather ambiguously a "glottalic laryngeal" by the source.

The Aghul alphabet was devised in the 1990s. Ever since then, it has been used as a language of education, with primers, textbooks, and dictionaries published.

There are four core cases: absolutive, ergative, genitive, and dative, as well as a large series of location cases. All cases other than the absolutive (which is unmarked) and ergative take the ergative suffix before their own suffix.

Independent and predicative adjectives take number marker and class marker; also, case if used as nominal. As attribute they are invariable. Thus idžed "good", ergative, idžedi, etc. -n, -s; pl. idžedar; but Idže insandi hhuč qini "The good man killed the wolf" (subject in ergative case).

• Haspelmath, Martin (1993). A grammar of Lezgian. Mouton grammar library. Vol. 9. Mouton de Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110884210. ISBN 3-11-013735-6. LCCN 92-45620.
• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.
• Talibov, Bukar B.; Gadžiev, Magomed M. (1966). Lezginsko-russkij slovar'. Moskva: Izd. Sovetskaja Ėnciklopedija. OCLC 231755759.

• Languages of the World report Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine
• UCLA phonetics lab data for Aghul
• Aghul word lists from the UCLA phonetics lab archive
• Aghul basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database