This region has a new language around every mountain. Over 50 languages and 7 language families! Learn why the Caucasus is one of the world’s language hot zones.
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~ CORRECTIONS ~
– pronunciation of Ossetian (thanks to Taymuraz Tsalikov)
~ BRIEFLY ~
The Caucasus was runner-up in my patron poll, and then it won in the rematch. So, it’s time we travel to this mountainous region and explore its complicated linguistic situation.
We go through major languages, family by family, briefly meeting Indo-European languages like Armenian and Kurdish, Turkic ones like Azeri, and even a Mongolic tongue named Kalmyk Oirat. Then, we see how linguists draw a line between “languages of the Caucasus” and the indigenous “Caucasian languages”.
The Caucasian languages fall in three families: Northeast Caucasian, Northwest Caucasian, and Kartvelian in the south. Explore some of their intriguing features, including massive numbers of consonants and one of the earliest documented examples of something called “ergativity”.
Despite some similar features, these languages don’t belong to the same family. In fact, they may not even be a true “linguistic area”!
At the end, we’re still left with the question: why so many languages? We’ll consider how one linguist looks at the relationship between geography and the lives of language families.
~ CREDITS ~
Art, narration, animation and outro music by Josh from NativLang
Doc full of sources for claims and credits for imgs, music and sfx:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/187Rgxm4pSU058WQxMHn0TPjLhrn3vCL9MwrXOZWnJgQ/
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