Languages of the Caucasus

The autochthonous languages of the Caucasus share some areal features, such as the presence of ejective consonants and a highly agglutinative structure, and, with the sole exception of Mingrelian, all of them exhibit a greater or lesser degree of ergativity.

[3][4] The most promising proposals are connections between the Northeast and Northwest Caucasian families and each other or with languages formerly spoken in Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia.

[6] While these two families share many similarities, their morphological structure, with many morphemes consisting of a single consonant, make comparison between them unusually difficult, and it has not been possible to establish a genetic relationship with any certainty.

Some linguists have claimed affinities between the Northwest Caucasian (Circassian) family and the extinct Hattic language of central Anatolia.

Linguists such as Sergei Starostin have proposed a Dené–Caucasian macrofamily, which includes the North Caucasian languages together with Basque, Burushaski, Na-Dené, Sino-Tibetan, and Yeniseian.

Other Indo-European languages spoken in the Caucasus include Greek (Pontic Greek), Persian (including Tat Persian), Kurdish, Talysh, Judeo-Tat, and the Slavic languages, such as Russian and Ukrainian, whose speakers number over a third of the total population of the Caucasus.

Other Turkic languages spoken include Karachay-Balkar, Kumyk, Nogai, Turkish, Turkmen and Urum.