Abkhaz

Last Updated: 2019-07-05

Background

Language Family: Northwest Caucasian / Northwest / Abkhaz-Abazin

• Abkhaz is spoken within Abkhazia, located in Georgia along the Black Sea.
• Where dialects diverge, my ruleset will prefer Standard Abkhaz.

Phonology

Consonants

• Chirikba (2003) depicts the alveolar series of consonants as dental (p. 18).
• Chirikba (2003) argues for the plain voiceless obstruents as aspirated (p. 19); Hewitt (1979) observes aspiration as well, but regards it as a non-distinctive part of the phoneme (p. 256).
• Koryakov (2002) and Hewitt (1979) argue for velar rather than uvular fricatives (p. 7; p. 258).
• The sources have diverged somewhat on what sibilants are present in Abkhaz. Catford (1977) lists both the /ʃ ʒ/ and /ɕ ʑ/ series as present in Abkhaz (p. 291); however, the consensus among other sources seems to be that /ɕ ʑ/ has only been preserved in a subset of Abkhaz dialects, and has been lost in Standard Abkhaz. Chirikba (2003) and Hewitt (1979) describe the postalveolar sibilants as being produced as retroflex (p. 19; pp. 256, 257); however, this view is not widely attested elsewhere, so I have preferred the more common /ʃ ʒ/ analysis. Hewitt (1979) also follows Catford in regarding /tɕ dʑ/ as phonemic (p. 256), but nevertheless I have continued to follow the more recent analyses that regard those phonemes as lost in Standard Abkhaz.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Pharyngeal
Stops (plain)	p b pʼ	t d tʼ			k ɡ kʼ	qʼ	ʡ
Stops (labialized)		tʷ dʷ tʷʼ			kʷ ɡʷ kʷʼ	qʷʼ
Stops (palatalized)					kʲ ɡʲ kʲʼ	qʲʼ
Affricates (plain)		ts dz tsʼ	tʃ dʒ tʃʼ
Affricates (palatalized)			tʃʲ dʒʲ tʃʲʼ
Fricatives (plain)	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ			χ ʁ	ħ
Fricatives (labialized)			ʃʷ ʒʷ			χʷ ʁʷ	ħʷ
Fricatives (palatalized)			ʃʲ ʒʲ			χʲ ʁʲ
Nasals	m	n
Trills		r
Approximants	w	l		j
Note: From left to right, phonemes that share a cell are voiceless, voiced, and ejective. If a cell only contains two phonemes, they are voiceless and voiced.

Vowels

• Some authors argue for the existence of /aː/, but Chirikba (2003) and Hewitt (1979) assert that [aː] is just a realization of the sequence /ħ a/ (p. 20; p. 263).
• [o e i u] all surface allophonically in certain environments (Chirikba 2003, 21; Hewitt 1979, 259–60).
• The Tapanta dialect “marginally preserves” a tonal system from older forms of Abkhaz, but all other dialects - including Standard Abkhaz - have lost it (Chirikba 1996, iii).

	Central
Mid	ə
Low	a

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
а	/a/
б	/b/
в	/v/
г	/ɡ/
ӷ	/ʁ/	⟨ҕ⟩ may be used instead
д	/d/
е	/a/
ж	/ʒ/
з	/z/
ӡ	/dz/
и	/j/
к	/kʼ/
қ	/k/
ҟ	/qʼ/
л	/l/
м	/m/
н	/n/
о	/a/
п	/pʼ/
ԥ	/p/	⟨ҧ⟩ may be used instead
р	/r/
с	/s/
т	/tʼ/
ҭ	/t/
у	/w/
ф	/f/
х	/χ/
ҳ	/ħ/
ц	/ts/
ҵ	/tsʼ/
ч	/tʃʲ/
ҷ	/tʃʲʼ/
ҽ	/tʃ/
ҿ	/tʃʼ/
ш	/ʃ/
ы	/ə/
ҩ	/ʡ/
џ	/dʒ/
ь		marks palatalization
ә		marks labialization

Lenition Rules

• Aspiration and ejectivization of consonants are only weakly realized (Chirikba 2003, 19).
• /qʼ/ debuccalizes to [ʔ] for many speakers (ibid.).
• Some speakers spirantize the consonant in the word /apʼa/, yielding [afʼa] (Hewitt 1979, 257).
• For some speakers, /ħʷ/ approximantizes to the labiopalatal approximant, [ɥ] (Hewitt 1979, 258).

Misc. Rules

• Labialized alveolar stops are often realized with full lip closure, causing them to be produced as [db], [tp], [tpʼ] (Chirikba 2003, 19).
• The semivowels /w/ and /j/ have vocalic allophones ([u] and [i] respectively) (ibid.).

References

Catford, J. C. 1977. “Mountain of Tongues: The Languages of the Caucasus.” Annual Review of Anthropology 6: 283–314.

Chirikba, Viacheslav A., ed. 1996. A Dictionary of Common Abkhaz.

———, ed. 2003. Abkhaz. Lincom Europa.

Hewitt, B. G., ed. 1979. Abkhaz. North-Holland Publishing Company.

Koryakov, Yuri B., ed. 2002. Atlas of Caucasian Languages. Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences.