Aghul language

Aghul is a Lezgic language spoken by the Aghuls in southern Dagestan, Russia and in Azerbaijan. It is spoken by about 33,200 people (2020 census).

Classification
Aghul belongs to the Eastern Samur group of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family.

Geographic distribution
In 2002, Aghul was spoken by 28,300 people in Russia, mainly in Southern Dagestan, as well as 32 people in Azerbaijan.

Related languages
There are nine languages in the Lezgian language family, namely: Aghul, Tabasaran, Rutul, Lezgian, Tsakhur, Budukh, Kryts, Udi and Archi.

Phonology
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.

Consonants

 * The glottal stop transcribed here is named rather ambiguously a "glottalic laryngeal" by the source.

Alphabet
The Aghul aphabet was devided in the 1990s. Ever since then, it has been used as a language of education, with primers, textbooks, and dictionaries published.

Case
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.

Adjectives
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).