Dargwa language

Dargwa (дарган мез, dargan mez) is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the Dargin people in the Russian republic Dagestan. This article discusses the literary dialect of the dialect continuum constituting the Dargin languages. It is based on the Aqusha and Urakhi dialects of Northern Dargin.

Dargwa is part of a Northeast Caucasian dialect continuum, the Dargin languages. The other languages in this dialect continuum (such as Kajtak, Kubachi, Itsari, and Chirag) are often considered variants of Dargwa, but also sometimes considered separate languages by certain scholars. Korjakov (2012) concludes that Southwestern Dargwa is closer to Kajtak than it is to North-Central Dargwa.

According to the 2002 Census, there are 429,347 speakers of Dargwa proper in Dagestan, 7,188 in neighbouring Kalmykia, 1,620 in Khanty–Mansi AO, 680 in Chechnya, and hundreds more in other parts of Russia. Figures for the Lakh dialect spoken in central Dagestan are 142,523 in Dagestan, 1,504 in Kabardino-Balkaria, 708 in Khanty–Mansi.^{[verification needed]}

Like other languages of the Caucasus, Dargwa is noted for its large consonant inventory, which includes over 40 phonemes (distinct sounds), though the exact number varies by dialect. Voicing, glottalization (as ejectives), fortition (which surfaces as gemination), and frication are some of the distinct features of consonants in Dargwa. Particularly noteworthy is the inclusion of an epiglottal ejective by some languages such as Mehweb, which it may be the only language in the world to use phonemically.^{[failed verification]} The following chart is of the literary dialect of Dargwa.

1. Mainly heard as an allophone of /ç/.

• The source is rather ambiguous in its using the term "laryngeal" for a presumed column of consonants that includes both a "voiced" and a "glottalized" plosive. A voiced glottal plosive cannot be made, because the glottis needs to be closed, and an ejective consonant requires an additional closure further up the vocal tract. Pending clarification, this row has been transcribed here as an epiglottal column and a glottal stop, both found in many other East Caucasian languages.

The Dargwa language features five vowel sounds /i, e, ə, a, u/. Vowels /i, u, a/ can be pharyngealized as /iˤ, uˤ, aˤ/. There is also a pharyngealized mid-back vowel [oˤ] as a realization of /uˤ/, occurring in the Mehweb variety.

The current Dargwa alphabet is based on Cyrillic as follows:

The first Dargin alphabet was created by Peter von Uslar in the late 19th century, published in the grammar Хюркилинский язык for the Urakhi dialect of Dargwa.

The Latin alphabet of the 1920s is not entirely supported by Unicode, but is approximately:

a ʙ c ç ꞓ d e ə f g ǥ ƣ h ħ ⱨ i j k ⱪ l m n o p ᶈ q ꝗ r s ꟍ ş t ţ u v w x ҳ ӿ z ƶ ⱬ ƶ̧

(The letters transcribed here ⱨ ⱪ ᶈ ҳ ⱬ might have cedillas instead of hooks; the printing in sources is not clear.)

Compiled from:

• Z. G. Abdullaev: Darginskij jazyk (3 Vol.). Moskau 1993. (in Russian)
• Z. G. Abdullaev: Darginskij jazyk Archived 2006-12-07 at the Wayback Machine. In: Jazyki narodov SSSR. Vol. 4. Moskau 1967. (in Russian)
• Karl Bouda: Die darginische Schriftsprache. (= Beiträge zur kaukasischen und sibirischen Sprachwissenschaft. Vol. 4). Leipzig 1937.
• Tb (2019). Daniel, Michael; Dobrushina, Nina; Ganenkov, Dmitry (eds.). The Mehweb language: Essays on phonology, morphology and syntax. Berlin: Language Science Press. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3374730. ISBN 978-3-96110-208-2.
• van den Berg, Helma (2001). Dargi folktales. Oral stories from the Caucasus. With an introduction to Dargi Grammar. Leiden: University of Leiden. ISBN 978-90-5789-066-6.

• An online dictionary of Sanzhi Dargwa (in Dictionaria), by Diana Forker
• Appendix:Cyrillic script
• Dargin language (in Russian)
• Consonant Systems of the North-East Caucasian Languages
• Dargwa basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• Sanzhi Dargwa DoReCo corpus compiled by Diana Forker and Nils Norman Schiborr. Audio recordings of narrative texts with transcriptions time-aligned at the phone level, translations, and - for some texts - time-aligned morphological annotations.