Chechen

The Chechen language, also called Noxçiyn Mama dua, is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by more than 1.4 million people, predominantly in the Chechen Republic and by Chechen diaspora communities in Russia and other countries. It is co-official with Russian in the Chechen Republic. The Chechen language is part of the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family. It is closely related to Ingush, with which it shares a common literary tradition and a high degree of mutual intelligibility. It is also closely related to Batsbi, a dialect of Georgian spoken by a minority of Chechens. Chechen is a highly agglutinative language, with a complex system of suffixes and postpositions. It is mostly suffixing, with a few prefixes. The language has a rich vocabulary, with loanwords from Russian, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. The Chechen alphabet is based on the Cyrillic script, with additional letters for Chechen-specific sounds. The alphabet was devised by Chechen scholar Yusup Kashaev in the 1930s and has been in use ever since. The Chechen language is spoken in a wide variety of dialects, with significant variation between urban and rural varieties. The most common dialect, spoken in the capital city of Grozny, is known as the Groznenski dialect. Other major dialects include the Avar dialect, spoken in the town of Khasavyurt, and the Dargin dialect, spoken in the town of Kizlyar. The Chechen language has been under pressure from Russian since the 19th century, when the Russian Empire began to expand into the Caucasus. In the Soviet Union, Chechen was downgraded to a dialect of Russian, and its use was discouraged. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, there has been a revival of interest in the Chechen language, and it is now taught in schools and used in the media.