From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aghul
агъул чӀал
Spoken in	Russia, also spoken in Azerbaijan
Region	Southeastern Dagestan
Total speakers	28,300 (2002 census)[1]
Language family	Northeast Caucasian Lezgic Samur Eastern Samur Lezgi-Aghul-Tabasaran Aghul
Official status
Official language in	Dagestan
Regulated by	No official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1	None
ISO 639-2	agx
ISO 639-3	agx
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Aghul, also spelled Agul, is a language spoken by the Aguls who live in southern Dagestan, Russia and in Azerbaijan. It is spoken by about 28,300 people (2002 census).

History

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.^[1]

Official status

Aghul is not an official language, and Lezgian is used as the literary language.

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.^[2]

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, which is the reason why they are traditionally transcribed with the length diacritic. The gemination of the consonant does not by itself create its tension, though morphologically tense consonants do often derive from adjoining two single weak consonants. Some Aghul dialects have an especially large number of permitted initial tense consonants.^[2]

Vowels

Consonants

• The glottal stop transcribed here is named rather ambiguously a "glottalic laryngeal" by the source.
• Also note that the source names the epiglottal series ″pharyngeal″ indiscriminately in all the tables, also when it includes a plosive and thus clearly isn't a true pharyngeal.

Historical sound changes

Description of important sound changes in the history of the language. (Maybe this should go under history?)

Alphabet

Grammar

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).

Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

Vocabulary

This section should contain a discussion of any special features of the vocabulary (or lexicon) of the language, like if it contains a large number of borrowed words or a different sets of words for different politeness levels, taboo groups, etc.

Writing system

Brief description of the writing system(s) used to write the language. Writing systems have their own page, so what's written here should just be a brief discussion of how this language makes any special use of the writing system and a link to all the writing systems used to write the language.

Examples

Some short examples of the language in the writing system(s) used to write the language. You might also include sound samples of the language being spoken.

References

Bibliography

• Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. A grammar of Lezgian. (Mouton grammar library; 9). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. – ISBN 3-11-013735-6
• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996), The Sounds of the World's Languages, Oxford: Blackwell, ISBN 0-631-19815-6 
• Talibov, Bukar B. and Magomed M. Gadžiev. 1966. Lezginsko-russkij slovar’. Moskva: Izd. Sovetskaja Ėnciklopedija.

External links

• Aghul language at Linguist List
• Entry for Agul at Rosetta Project
• Languages of the World report
• UCLA phonetics lab data for Agul
• Agul word lists from the UCLA phonetics lab archive