Hinukh language
| Hinukh | |
|---|---|
| гьинузас мец / hinuzas mec | |
| Pronunciation | [hiˈnuzas mɛt͡s] |
| Native to | Russia |
| Region | Southern Dagestan |
| Ethnicity | Hinukh people |
|
Native speakers
|
5 (2010 census) |
|
Northeast Caucasian
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | hinu1240 |
The Hinuq language (autonym: гьинузас мец hinuzas mec, also known as Hinukh, Hinux, Ginukh, or Ginux) is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Tsezic subgroup. It is spoken by about 200 to 500 people, the Hinukhs, in the Tsuntinsky 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.
Hinukh distinguishes 6 vowel qualities /a, e, i, o, u, y/, all of which can be either long or short. Two vowels can occur pharyngealized: /aˤ/ and /eˤ/. However, these are only used by the older generation. Today they are usually replaced by /i/.
Like many Caucasian languages, Hinuq has a large number of consonants. In addition to voiced and unvoiced consonants, there are also ejectives.
It is an agglutinative language which makes mainly use of suffixes.
Hinukh is an ergative-absolutive language and, like most Northeast Caucasian languages, shows a rich case system. There are six non-spatial cases (Absolutive, Ergative, First Genitive, Second Genitive, Dative, Instrumental) as well as 35 spatial cases. The spatial case system itself consists of two categories, location (cont, in, sub, spr, at, aloc, iloc) and orientation, expressed by the use of direction markers (Essive, Lative, First Ablative, Second Ablative, Directional). The plural suffix is almost unvariably -be.
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