Aghul is a Lezgic language within the Northeast Caucasian family, primarily spoken by the Aghuls in Azerbaijan and Southern Dagestan in Russia. It is spoken by about 33,200 people (2020 census).

Classification

Aghul belongs to the Eastern Samur group of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family. Glottolog splits the Aghul language between the Qushan/Koshan group and other Aghul dialects due to the Qushan dialects being unintelligible with the other dialects.

Geographic distribution

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

Related languages

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

Phonology

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 Aghul dialects have a large number of permitted initial tense consonants.

Vowels

Consonants

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

Alphabet

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.

Grammar

Case

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.

Adjectives

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

Pronouns

Personal pronouns

Sample text

References

Bibliography

External links

• Languages of the World report

• UCLA phonetics lab data for Aghul

• Aghul word lists from the UCLA phonetics lab archive

• Aghul basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database