West Caucasian Proto-Language: Origin and Stages of Evolutionary Development

Viacheslav Chirikba (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; D.I. Gulia Abkhazian Institute for Research in the Humanities, Sukhumi; chirikba@gmail.com)

Journal of Language Relationship, № 22/3-4, 2024 - p.262-280

Abstract: Comparative analysis of West Caucasian and East Caucasian languages indicates that early Proto-West Caucasian underwent a radical restructuring of its phonological, morphological and syntactic structures, as a result of which at a certain stage of evolution it became analytic, with elementary inflection, expressing the main grammatical roles by lexical means, word order and, possibly, also tones. The subsequent development of word composition and incorporation led to the formation of a prefixal polypersonal polysynthetic agglutinative language, typical of modern West Caucasian languages. Although these “catastrophic” changes have largely obscured the genetic relationship between West Caucasian and East Caucasian languages, their relationship can be demonstrated by applying standard procedures of comparative-historical linguistics.

Keywords: West Caucasian languages, East Caucasian languages, North Caucasian languages, linguistic reconstruction

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