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Aghul language

Aghul
агъул чӀал / Ağul ҫ̇al
Native to Russia, also spoken in Azerbaijan
Region Southeastern Dagestan
Ethnicity Aguls
Native speakers
29,000 (2010 census)
Northeast Caucasian
  • Lezgic
    • Samur
      • Eastern Samur
        • Lezgi–Aghul–Tabasaran
          • Aghul
Cyrillic
Official status
Official language in
Dagestan (Russia)
Language codes
ISO 639-3
Glottolog aghu1253

Aghul, also spelled Agul, is a language spoken by the Aghuls in southern Dagestan, Russia and in Azerbaijan. It is spoken by about 29,300 people (2010 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.

Aghul is not an official language, and Lezgian is used as the literary language.

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 Aghul dialects have an especially large number of permitted initial tense consonants.

The vowels in bold are vowels that appears in «others letters combinations» in omniglot.

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).


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