Ubykh language

Uncommon card · No. 148475

Ubykh was a Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, an ethnic group of Circassians who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being killed or deported en masse by Russia to the Ottoman Empire during the Circassian genocide. Ubykh is ergative and polysynthetic, with a high degree of agglutination, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants but only two phonemically distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants, it has one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, and the largest number for any language without clicks. The name Ubykh is derived from Убых (/wɨbɨx/), from Убыхыбзэ, its name in the Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Oubykh (French); and its Germanised variant Päkhy (from Ubykh /tʷɜχɨ/).

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