Tabasaran

the language of the Tabasarans. It is spoken in Tabasaran and Khiv raions, Dagestan ASSR. There are approximately 44,000 speakers of Tabasaran (1970).

A new written language belonging to the Nakho-Dagestanian group of Caucasian languages, Tabasaran has northern and southern dialects. The phonetic system includes five vowels and 55 consonants, with a four-way system of opposition of obstruents and affricates and a three-way system of opposition of fricatives. There are pharyngealized and labialized consonants and a special group of labialized dental consonants. The morphology of Tabasaran includes the world’s richest case paradigm owing to eight series of locative cases. There are verbal categories of person, class, number, tense, mood, and mode of action, as well as participles and adverbial participles. The typology of the sentence is ergative. Word order follows the pattern subject-object-predicate. The attribute precedes the dependent member.

The vocabulary of Tabasaran contains many borrowings from Azerbaijani; the writing system is based on the Russian alphabet.