The Caucasus: Mountains Full of Languages

Caucasian.
That word comes to us from a rugged land where Europe smacks into Asia, sandwiched between
countries that grab headlines: Russia, Iran, Turkey.
But here's a headline for you: this little area is one of the world's great linguistic
hot zones, a place where the mountains are full of languages.
Welcome to the Caucasus.
Georgia... is a US state that's about 300 miles tall, with a population over 10 million.
Most everyone here speaks one language: English.
A turn of the globe away, straddling the Southeast of Europe is a country we call Turkey.
And east of Turkey there's another Georgia.
Watch what happens when I take Georgia and put it over Georgia.
There's more Georgia left.
It leaks into Russia and over into Azerbaijan.
It even covers part of Armenia and Turkey.
All these borders between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, but these are nothing compared
to the number of languages here.
As the Kurdish saying goes, "We have no friends but the mountains."
I don't know Kurdish or the more than 50 languages of the Caucasus, but Kurdish IS a distant
relative of the words I'm speaking right now.
It's in the Iranian branch of our Indo-European family, which is something it shares with
Scythian's last descendant, Ossetian.
You can hear echoes of familiar words like the word for door: "derî", "duar".
In Armenia, a door sounds similar: դուռ (dur).
But Armenian is a separate Indo-European branch.
Their unique alphabet was created by this gentleman scholar, Mr Mashtots, making Armenian
one of the rare languages in the region with its own old writings.
Some Armenians claim Mashtots also taught the Georgians how to write, but
but Georgians beg to differ.
Armenian splits another language down the middle in this disputed turf, where the name
you give it and whether you call the fighting in the 90s liberation or occupation,
is tense stuff.
This other language belongs to the country with the world's lowest capital, nearly 100
feet (30 meters) below sea level.
Azerbaijani, after all that Indo-European, looks strange.
Unless you know Turkish.
The Turkic family has multiple branches all over the Caucasus.
It builds long words with glued-on endings where the vowels harmonize.
A lot like Hungarian, remember?
Things aren't so Turkic up here in Europe's only Buddhist region.
This is Kalmykia, a Russian republic settled by Oirats, who speak a relative of Mongolian.
So there's Mongolic here.
There's Hellenic here, Caucasus Greek.
There's Semitic, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic.
But there was one obvious blob we ignored.
C'mon, who brings the big guns into this area?
Ahem, metaphorically speaking of course.
Russian, in the Slavic branch of Indo-European:
дверь (dver').
A couple years ago, Russia held the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi.
Drama ensued.
What attracted a lot of press was the exorbitant cost, but there's another controversy you
may have missed.
Ethnic Circassians have long considered Sochi their land, taken in the 1800s when the Russian
Empire vowed to conquer the Caucasus and pacify, or expel, every indigenous group.
One of the men in that army was Leo Tolstoy.
This is where he tasted war and started writing.
The last speaker of Sochi's Ubykh language died in Turkey in 1992.
With him perished the largest consonant inventory outside of Africa – over three times as
many as English!
And just to be extreme, only two basic vowels: a and ə.
This is the kind of special stuff that keeps language nerds infatuated with indigenous
Caucasian languages.
Indigenous... means something special here.
See, for linguists, there are "languages of the Caucasus" and then "Caucasian languages",
these smaller families born in and limited to the Caucasus.
Few vowels.
Many consonants.
Including throaty sounds: q͡χa, ʡa, ħa.
English has one such sound.
Arabic, several.
No competition for these Caucasian tongues!
Oh, and they probably had even more in the past.
But the real Caucasian hot topic came from one example in an old grammar of Tsova-Tush.
There was an intransitive verb with a subject that could resemble an object: I fell (and
it was my fault, like on purpose) vs fell me (on accident).
It sounds simple, but the implications were huge.
This example fell into the right hands and the concept of "ergativity" became a linguistic
rockstar.
In 1770, a German naturalist set out on an expedition to the Caucasus.
Trekking with a royal Kabardian and Georgian entourage, he took notes and divided Caucasian
languages into four families, each one with its own proto-language.
And he did this over a decade before a well-known speech by Sir William Jones that drew attention
to classifying Indo-European.
Later there did come a one-family-fits-all push to bundle them into Ibero-Caucasian.
The idea ultimately failed to win converts.
Today we count three families: Northwest, Northeast, South.
The south, Kartvelian, includes Georgian, an indigenous language
with its own ancient literature.
And the reason why Joseph Stalin, a native Georgian, had odd accent patterns in his speeches.
Tsova-tush, though, that's in Northeast Caucasian, a family native to the border republics of
Dagestan and Chechnya.
Chechen has an oddly large number of vowels for a Caucasian language.
This line marks a republic where they speak a Georgian dialect.
They're on good terms.
But not so these dots, where they broke away in 1992 with 13 months of ethnic strife.
The local Abkhaz is part of Northwest Caucasian, the family of Circassian
and your old consonant-full friend, Ubykh.
This family has been blamed for making Caucasian hard to classify.
See, they have roots with one measly consonant, and they do something called "head-marking".
As a result, they can lose resemblances more quickly, making it harder to compare them
and find siblings.
Caucasian isn't one family.
Is it one area though?
Perhaps the languages coexisted long enough to pick up each other's habits.
It's not out of the question; we saw how it happened in Mesoamerica.
It's still debated if this even fits for the Caucasus.
So maybe not a language area, but definitely an area with lots of languages.
And you've still got to be wondering, why?
Why so many?
Johanna Nichols tells us the answer may not be on these speakers' lips
but under their feet.
Geography gives some families spread zones, easy terrain for expanding.
Other terrains are residual zones, holding languages in place.
Which zone is responsible here?
I hope you said... both!
Languages from the lowlands flow into the area, then the mountains keep them.
So the three Caucasian families survived in place and didn't spread beyond.
Over time, others passed through and got stuck, and the diversity grew.
We end up with this map, a map of more than 50 languages across seven families,
each splash of color with its own stories to tell.
Stick around and subscribe for language.

The Caucasus: Mountains Full of Languages

Latest Posts