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Ubykh language
Extinct Northwest Caucasian language / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ubykh is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, a subgroup of Circassians who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to the Ottoman Empire in the Circassian genocide.[2]
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Ubykh | |
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tuex̂ıbze tʷɜxɨbzɜ | |
Pronunciation | /tʷɜxɨbzɜ/ |
Native to | Circassia |
Region | Sochi |
Ethnicity | Ubykh |
Extinct | 7 October 1992, with the death of Tevfik Esenç |
Northwest Caucasian
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Unwritten, but provisional orthographies have been developed | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | uby |
Glottolog | ubyk1235 |
![]() Ubykh (extinct) | |
![]() Ubykh is classified as Extinct according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger [1] | |
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The Ubykh language is ergative and polysynthetic, with a high degree of agglutination, 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,[3] and the largest number for any language without clicks.
The name Ubykh is derived from Убых (/wɨbɨx/), from Убыхыбзэ, its name in the Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Oubykh (French); and its Germanised variant Päkhy (from Ubykh /tʷɜχɨ/).