Aghul language
Aghul is a Lezgic language spoken by the Aghuls in Azerbaijan and Southern Dagestan in Russia. It is spoken by about 33,200 people.
Classification
Aghul belongs to the Eastern Samur group of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family. Glottolog splits the Aghul language between the Qushan/Koshan group and other Aghul dialects due to the Qushan dialects being unintelligible with the other dialects.Geographic distribution
In 2002, Aghul was spoken by 28,300 people in Russia, mainly in Southern Dagestan, as well as 32 people in Azerbaijan.Related languages
There are nine languages in the Lezgian language family, namely: Aghul, Tabasaran, Rutul, Lezgian, Tsakhur, Budukh, Kryts, Udi and Archi.Phonology
Aghul has contrastive epiglottal consonants.Aghul makes, like many Northeast Caucasian languages, a distinction between tense consonants with concomitant length and weak consonants. The tense consonants are characterized by the intensiveness of articulation, which naturally leads to a lengthening of the consonant, so they are traditionally transcribed with the length diacritic. The gemination of the consonant itself does not create its tension, but morphologically tense consonants often derive from adjoining two single weak consonants. Some Aghul dialects have a large number of permitted initial tense consonants.
Consonants
- The glottal stop transcribed here is named rather ambiguously a "glottalic laryngeal" by the source.