Thomas Wier
Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Free University of Tbilisi.

It is a near certainty that Abkhaz was spoken in Abkhazia going back to remote antiquity.

Unlike other languages spoken on or near the Black Sea like Georgian, Armenian and Greek with long written histories, Abkhaz was never written down until very recently, and so we have almost no direct evidence that it was spoken in Abkhazia before the 17th century with the publication of Turkish travel-writer Evliya Celebi’s Seyahatname ‘Book of Travel’, which mentions a few words of Abkhaz. However, we do have virtual proof of its existence there from an unusual source: ancient Greek pottery.

Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics
Vol. 1, (1980), pp. 253-263

The aim of this article will be to show how a North West Caucasian language, viz. Abkhaz , treats words of foreign origin / and to establish several layers of loans according to historical background and a different degree of adaptation.

Within the group of NWC langages Abkhaz and Abazinian are closely related, as are Circassian and Kabardian. Ubykh stands somewhere between these two branches, but is not spoken anymore in the Soviet Union. A few repre- sentatives of this language can still be found in Turkey.

Aza Petrovna Tikhonova
Candidate of Philology, Associate Professor of English Philology Department, Adyghe State University.

Bulletin of the Adyghe State University. Series 2: Philology and Art History, 4 (187) 2016.

For the first time an attempt is made to single out locative-directional prefixes in the Hattian verbs, reveal their meaning and functions by comparing them with locative-directional prefixes in the Abkhazian-Adyghe languages. While singling out prefixes we took into consideration legitimate sound correspondences of vowels and consonants in the Hattian and Abkhazian-Adyghe languages:voiced-voiceless, palatal-hard, etc. Hattian sentences are given in Latin, their Abkhazian-Adyghe matches in the Cyrillic alphabet and Latin transliteration in square brackets. The materials of the study were bilingual texts «The God of Moon Fallen from the Heaven» and «A Building Ritual». The methodology of the investigation is based on L. Talmy’s cognitive semantics and typology. Orientation relationships are used for analyzing the meaning of Hattian verbal prefixes.

The Relation of Proto-West Caucasian to Hattic by Viacheslav Chirikba

In his book "Common West Caucasian" (Leiden, 1996), the author touches upon the problem of the external relations of Common West Caucasian, namely, with the long extinct Hattic language of ancient Asia Minor (early second millennium B.C.).

Already the first explorer of Hattic, E. Forrer (1919: 1033, 1034), established its non-Indo-European character and suggested its relationship with Abkhazo-Adyghean languages. The same idea was proposed nearly at the same time by R. Bleichsteiner (1923).

This is a special internet edition of the article
“The Caucasian language material in Evliya Çelebi’s ‘Travel Book’. A Revision”
by Jost Gippert (1991).

It should not be quoted as such. For quotations, please refer to the original edition in
Caucasian Perspectives, ed. G. Hewitt, Unterschleissheim / München 1992, 8-62.

Stephen D. Shenfield | Special to Abkhaz World

Introduction

Prior to the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Abkhaz and the other languages of the mountain peoples existed only in oral form. They acquired writing systems as a delayed side effect of the conquest. This process was initiated by Baron Pyotr (Peter) Karlovich Uslar1 (1816 – 1875), a military engineer who became a pioneer in European studies of the Caucasus, especially the North Caucasus, and its peoples and languages.

Dr. Viacheslav A. Chirikba
D.I. Gulia Institute for Humanities Research
Sukhum, Republic of Abkhazia

In this paper, I shall discuss the global problem of language endangerment and how it pertains to the Abkhazo-Adyghean languages; I shall also put forward some proposals concerned with securing the future of these languages both in the Caucasus and in the Diaspora.

Ekho Kavkaza -- The Abkhaz language is officially registered in UNESCO’s list of endangered languages. The critical situation observed today has not something that emerged just yesterday or the day before. Among the numerous significant factors that have resulted in the current state of the Abkhaz language we can outline the calamity of the ‘Great Exile’ (makhadzhirstvo) in the 19th century, which turned Abkhazia into a country with a multi-ethnic population where the Russian language slowly but surely acquired the status of the language of interethnic communication; then there was the Georgian demographic and political expansion during the ascendancy of Beria in the mid-20^th century, which in part led to Abkhaz-language schools being forced to adopt the Georgian language as the language of tuition. Such were the main but far from all the historical episodes and factors conditioning the current situation.

Prof. Georges Charachidzé has passed away on 20 Feb. 2010, in Paris.

Born in 1930 in France of a Georgian father and a French mother, Georges Charachidzé became a pupil of the great French scholar Georges Dumézil in 1953 when the latter agreed to supervise Charachidzé's doctoral thesis, which turned into his first publication ('Le Système religieux de la Géorgie païenne' = 'The Religious System of Pagan Georgia'). He was to adopt his supervisor's interests in the Caucasus and eventually, after Dumézil's death, take on his mantle as main collaborator with Ubykh's last fully competent speaker Tevfik Esenç in order to continue research on this soon-to-become-extinct North West Caucasian language -- Tevfik himself died in 1992.

Iran and the Caucasus, Volume 10, Number 1, 2006 , pp. 25-76(52)
 
Abstract 
 
The paper presents a thorough investigation of the Abkhaz borrowings in Megrelian, including structural loans, grammatical elements, adjectives, adverbs, numerals, and appellativa (anatomical and medical terms, household items, terms related to husbandry and pasture, floristic and zoological names, religious terms, landscape, food, etc.). The author examines also the cases of the Abkhaz influence on Megrelian onomasticon.

CONFERENCE 

Abkhazia in the Context of Contemporary International Relations
Pitsunda, The Republic of Abkhazia: June 29 - July 1, 2004

Though the title of this presentation may seem somewhat out of place in the context of the topic of the conference, I feel justified in discussing the matter in the conviction that a state's language-policy is an integral part of the way it presents itself to the outside world. It can, thus, help to shape general attitudes to the state and ultimately affect inter-state relations, both in the region and more widely.