Almost the entire library of Chechen medieval writing in Arabic and Georgian script about the land of Chechnya and its people was destroyed by Soviet authorities in 1944, leaving the modern Chechens and modern historians with a destroyed and no longer existent historical treasury of writings.

Together with the closely related Ingush, with which there exists a large degree of mutual intelligibility and shared vocabulary, it forms the Vainakh branch.

There are a number of Chechen dialects: Aukh, Chebarloish, Malkhish, Nokhchmakhkakhoish, Orstkhoish, Sharoish, Shuotoish, Terloish, Itum-Qalish and Himoish.

Oharoy muott forms the basis for much of the standard and literary Chechen language, which can largely be traced to the regional dialects of Urus-Martan and contemporary Grozny.

Until recently, however, Himoy was undocumented and was considered a branch of Sharoish, as many dialects are also used as the basis of intertribal (teip) communication within a larger Chechen "tukkhum".

Some Jordanians are literate in Chechen as well, having managed to read and write to people visiting Jordan from Chechnya.

[10] Some phonological characteristics of Chechen include its wealth of consonants and sounds similar to Arabic and the Salishan languages of North America, as well as a large vowel system resembling those of Swedish and German.

Typical of the region, a four-way distinction between voiced, voiceless, ejective and geminate fortis stops is found.

Unlike most other languages of the Caucasus, Chechen has an extensive inventory of vowel sounds, putting its range higher than most languages of Europe (most vowels being the product of environmentally conditioned allophonic variation, which varies by both dialect and method of analysis).

/æ/, /æː/ and /e/, /eː/ are in complementary distribution (/æ/ occurs after pharyngealized consonants, whereas /e/ does not and /æː/—identical with /æ/ for most speakers—occurs in closed syllables, while /eː/ does not) but speakers strongly feel that they are distinct sounds.

Chechen permits syllable-initial clusters /st px tx/ and non-initially also allows /x r l/ plus any consonant, and any obstruent plus a uvular of the same manner of articulation.

At the same time, the alphabet devised by Peter von Uslar, consisting of Cyrillic, Latin, and Georgian letters, was used for academic purposes.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the de facto secession of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria from Russia, a new Latin script was devised and was used parallel to Cyrillic until the dissolution of the separatist state.

But after the defeat of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria government by the Russian Armed Forces, the Cyrillic alphabet was restored.

[14] Chechen was not a traditionally written language, but due to the public's familiarity with the Arabic script - as the script of instruction in the region's Islamic and Quranic schools - the Arabic alphabet was first standardized and adopted for Chechen during the reign of Imam Shamil.

The clergy and Islamic educational institutions opposed each and every iteration of proposed reforms in the Arabic script.

ي ﻻ ه و ن م ل ڮ ك ڨ ق ف غ ع ظ ط ض ص ش س ز ر ذ د خ ح ج ث ت ب ا In this alphabet, two additional letters were added to the base Arabic script:[16] In 1910, Sugaip Gaisunov proposed additional reforms that brought Arabic alphabet closer to Chechen's phonetic requirements.

Sugaip Gaisunov introduced four additional consonants:[16] In Sugaip Gaisunov's reforms, the letters ص ‎ (ṣād/sād) and ض ‎ (zād/ḍād) had their usage limited to Arabic loanwords but were not eliminated due to opposition from Clergy and conservative segments of Chechen society.

Arabic script itself is an impure abjad, meaning that most but not all vowels are shown with diacritics, which are in most cases left unwritten.

Those in parentheses are optional or only found in Russian words: In addition, several sequences of letters for long vowels and consonants, while not counted as separate letters in their own right, are presented here to clarify their correspondences: Chechen is an agglutinative language with an ergative–absolutive morphosyntactic alignment.

Chechen nouns belong to one of several genders or classes (6), each with a specific prefix with which the verb or an accompanying adjective agrees.

Word order is consistently left-branching (like in Japanese or Turkish), so that adjectives, demonstratives and relative clauses precede the nouns they modify.

Complementizers and adverbial subordinators, as in other Northeast and in Northwest Caucasian languages, are affixes rather than independent words.

It can be difficult to decide which phrases belong in the dictionary, because the language's grammar does not permit the borrowing of new verbal morphemes to express new concepts.

[20] Morphologically, noun classes may be indexed by changes in the prefix of the accompanying verb and, in many cases, the adjective too.

In transitive clauses in compound continuous tenses formed with the auxiliary verb -u 'to be', both agent and object are in absolutive case.

): Most Chechen vocabulary is derived from the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family, although there are significant minorities of words derived from Arabic (Islamic terms, like "Iman", "Ilma", "Do'a") and a smaller amount from Turkic (like "kuzga", "shish", belonging to the universal Caucasian stratum of borrowings) and most recently Russian (modern terms, like computer – "kamputar", television – "telvideni", televisor – "telvizar", metro – "metro" etc.