Members of the Chechen diaspora who settled in Bavaria and the eastern Mediterranean sometimes use Latin characters because they are familiar, but their efforts are not standardized. In 2002, the Russian language was mandated for education, which may threaten the future of numerous local languages. Historically, the Arabic alphabet was used for Chechen, but since 1862, a Cyrillic-based alphabet was the dominant script, with recurring and politically controversial attempts to convert to Latin. Like several middle eastern and central Asian languages, Chechen exemplifies synchronic digraphia-a language written with several alphabets, usually Arabic, Cyrillic, or Latin. History and OrthographyĬhechen and Ingush are related to Vainakh, a northeast Caucasian language. With them goes the link to ancestral history. When orthography changes, books in previous alphabets become obsolete and are destroyed. More recently, however, technology, Soviet expansion, and wars have left their mark and have wiped out a sizable portion of native literature. Historically, these cultural groups retained a certain autonomy that is reflected in their languages. This is largely due to cultural isolation-mountain strongholds are harder to conquer. Not in terms of their language specifics or background (although both languages are agglutinative), but in resistance to outside influences. In some ways, the Caucasians and Basques have characteristics in common. Russian is also spoken and mandated in some areas. The Avar or Azerbaijani languages are used bilingually for economic transactions by a number of people in this region. Some of the minority languages are spoken by only a few thousand people and may be gone in a generation or two. Chechen has a longer written history than most of the minority languages. In general, minority languages and even some of the majority languages in the northern Caucasus region did not have their own alphabets until the 19th and 20th centuries. This remarkable language had 82 consonants and only two vowels (Coene, 2009). Ubykh, one of the languages in the Akbhaz-Circassian language group, became extinct in 1992. Chechen and Nearby LanguagesĬhechen is spoken by a little more than a million people in a culturally ancient and linguistically diverse region between the Black and Caspian seas, bordering Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Russia. It was actually the Azerbijani language that attracted my attention first, for a number of reasons, but after I began to appreciate the diversity of languages in this region, I learned of some unusual aspects of Chechen and decided to look into this, as well. This blog takes us further east, to the region between the Black and Caspian seas, where a surprisingly diverse group of languages, some of which are nearly extinct, are still spoken in cultures that are thousands of years old. In July 2018, I posted a blog on Tischlbong, a Slavic/Bavarian blended language spoken in the village of Timau on the Bavaria/Italian border. The Chechens live in the mountains, in a linguistically diverse region that includes some very old languages. Currently there are about 1.4 million Chechen speakers, mostly in the Caucasus, but also in scattered colonies in the eastern Mediterranean, western Russia, and Bavaria/Tirol. Speakers of Chechen sometimes have difficulty reading and writing their own language.
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