Bezhta language
The Bezhta language, also known as Kapucha, belongs to the Tsezic group of the North Caucasian language family. It is spoken by about 6,200 people in southern Dagestan, Russia.
Classification
Its closest linguistic relatives are Hunzib and Khwarshi.Dialects
Bezhta can be divided into three dialects – Bezhta Proper, and Khocharkhota – which are spoken in various villages in the region.Phonology
Bezhta has a rich consonantal and – unlike its relatives Tsez and Avar – a relatively large vowel inventory, compared to other languages of the same family.Vowels
Bezhta contrasts vowel length and nasalization.Orthography
Bezhta is unwritten, but various attempts have been made to develop an official orthography for the language. The Bezhta people use Avar as the literary language. The first book ever printed in Bezhta was the Gospel of Luke. The orthography used in translations of biblical texts is as follows:Morphology
Bezhta is mostly agglutinative and the vast amount of locative cases makes its case system particularly rich. The verb morphology is relatively simple. It is an ergative language.Numerals
Unlike Tsez, Bezhta has a decimal system with the word for twenty being an exception.- Multiples of 10 higher than 20 are formed by adding the suffix -yig to the multiplier. Hence, the word for 30 is łanayig.
- Compound numbers are formed by juxtaposition, the smaller numbers following the greater ones. The number 47 is thus expressed as ṏqʼönäyig aƛna.