HINUKH LANGUAGE

The 'Hinukh language' (Hinukh: 'гьинузас мец' ''hinuzas mec'', also known as 'Ginukh' or 'Hinux') is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Tsezic subgroup. It is spoken by about 200 to 500 people, the Hinukhs, in the Tsunta district of southwestern Dagestan, mainly in the village of Genukh (Hinukh: ''Hino''). Hinukh is very closely related to Tsez, but they are not entirely mutually intelligible.
Only half of the children of the village speak the Hinukh language. As Hinukh is unwritten, like the other members of the Tsezic family, Avar and Russian are used as literary language. Hinukh is not considered to have dialects, but due to its linguistic proximity to Tsez it was once considered a Tsez dialect.
The Hinukh people were already mentioned in the Georgian chronicles of the Early Middle Ages. The language itself was first described in 1916 by Russian ethnographer A. Serzhputovsky.

Contents

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Morphology

Nouns

Verbs

Numerals

External links

Phonology

Vowels

Hinukh distinguishes 6 vowel qualities (''a'', ''e'', ''o'', ''i'', ''u'' and a rounded vowel ''ü''), all of which can be either long or short. Two vowels can occur pharyngealized: ''ˤa'' and ''ˤe'' — however, they're only used by the older generation. Today it is usually replaced by ''i''.

Consonants

Morphology

It is an agglutinative language which makes mainly use of suffixes.

Nouns

Hinukh is an ergative-absolutive language and, like most Northeast Caucasian languages, shows a rich case system. The plural suffix is almost unvariably ''-be''.

Verbs

Tenses are marked synthetically on the verbs by means of affixes. As its sister languages Bezhta and Tsez, Hinukh differentiates between "witnessed past" (ending in ''-s'' or ''-š'') and "unwitnessed past" (in ''-no''), the present tense is marked with the suffix ''-ho''. In the future tense, Hinukh distinguishes a "direct future" (''-n''), which is used only in the first person, and a "indirect future" (''-s'') used for all other persons.

Numerals

The numeral system is vigesimal, which means that it is a base-20 system, a feature commonly found among the languages of the Caucasus.

External links

★ Ethnologue report for Hinukh

★ The Peoples of the Red Book: THE HINUKHS