Ubykh language
| Ubykh | |
|---|---|
| /tʷaxəbza/ | |
| Native to | Circassia |
| Region | Manyas, Balıkesir |
| Extinct | October 1992, with the death of Tevfik Esenç |
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Northwest Caucasian
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
| Glottolog | ubyk1235 |
Ubykh (extinct)
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Ubykh or Ubyx is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people (who originally lived along the eastern coast of the Black Sea before migrating en masse to Turkey in the 1860s). The language's last native speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died in 1992.
The Ubykh language is ergative and agglutinative, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants, but only two phonemically distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants it has one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, the largest number for any language without clicks.
The name Ubykh is derived from /wəbəx/, its name in the Abdzakh Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Ubıh (Turkish) and Oubykh (French); and Pekhi (from Ubykh /tʷaχə/) and its Germanised variant Päkhy.
Ubykh is distinguished by the following features, some of which are shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages:
Ubykh has 84 phonemic consonants, a record high amongst languages without click consonants, but only 2 phonemic vowels. Four of these consonants are found only in loanwords and onomatopoeia. There are nine basic places of articulation for the consonants and extensive use of secondary articulation, such that Ubykh has 20 different uvular phonemes. Ubykh distinguishes three types of postalveolar consonants: apical, laminal, and laminal closed. Regarding the vowels, even though there are only two phonemic vowels, there is a great deal of allophony.
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