about

Dargwa

Dargwa is a language of the Nakh-Dagestanian (East Caucasian) language family spoken in the central part of Dagestan (North Caucasus, Russian Federation). Due to its dialectal divergency, many linguists and speakers of Dargwa prefer to treat it as a group of several languages. The grammar of Dargwa shows many features typical of the Nakh-Dagestanian family (like morphological ergativity and rich agglutinative morphology) as well as some specific and even unique features (like long-distance agreement, backward control, non-standard anaphors, etc.), which create serious problems for the linguistic theory.

Lecturers

Nina Sumbatova

Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Science

introduction

genetic affiliation: see classification in glottolog.

phonetics

materials

content	sound	content	sound	content	sound
apricot		bread		dog
donkey		eye		fire
head		hen		leaf
mill		snow		tree
woman

morphology

syntax

sources

general

general introductions, encyclopedias, atlas, handbooks, including some general books about Caucasian languages

Koryakov, Yuri. 2006. Atlas kavkazskix jazykov [An atlas of the Caucasian languages]. Moscow: RAN.
Dobrushina, Nina, Michael Daniel & Yuri Koryakov. 2021. Languages and sociolinguistics of the Caucasus. In Maria Polinsky (ed.), The Oxford handbook of languages of the Caucasus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (online available)
Polinsky, Maria (ed.). 2021. The Oxford handbook of languages of the Caucasus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (publisher's website)
Testelets, Yakov G. 1998. Word order in Daghestanian languages. In Anna Siewierska (ed.), Constituent order in the languages of Europe, 257–280. Berlin: de Gruyter. (publisher's website)
Uslar, Peter K. 1892. Ètnografia Kavkaza. Vol. 5: Xjurkilinskij dialekt [The ethnography of the Caucasus, vol. 5: The Khjurkili dialect]. Tiflis.

grammar

grammars, grammatical overviews or sketches

Abdullaev, Said. 1954. Grammatika darginskogo jazyka: Fonetika i morfologija [A grammar of Dargwa: Phonetics and morphology]. Makhachkala: DFAN SSSR, Institut istorii, jazyka i literatury.
Abdullaev, Zapir G., A.A. Abdusalamov, Magomed-Said M. Musaev & Sapijakhanum M. Temirbulatova. 2014. Sovremennij darginskij jazyk [Modern Dargwa]. Makhachkala: IJaLI DNC RAN.
Daniel, Michael, Dmitry Ganenkov & Nina Dobrushina (eds.). 2019. The Mehweb language. Selected essays on phonology, morphology and syntax. Berlin: Language Science Press. (online available at publisher's website)
Forker, Diana. 2020. A Grammar of Sanzhi Dargwa. Berlin: Language Science Press. (online available at publisher's website)
Magometov, Aleksandr A. 1963. Kubačinskij jazyk [The Kubachi language]. Tbilisi: Izd. AN Gruz. SSR.
Sumbatova, Nina. Dargwa. 2021. In: Maria Polinsky (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus. Pp.147-200. (online available)
Sumbatova, Nina & Yury Lander. 2014. Darginskij govor selenija Tanty: Grammatičeskij očerk, voprosy sintaksisa [The Dargwa dialect of the village of Tanti: Grammar sketch, syntactic topics]. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury. (online available)
Sumbatova, Nina & Rasul Mutalov. 2003. A grammar of Icari Dargwa. Munich: Lincom. (online available)
Temirbulatova, Sapijakhanum M. 2005. Xajdakskij dialect darginskogo jazyka [The Khajtag dialect of Dargwa]. Makhachkala: IJaLI DNC RAN.

morphosyntactic issues

Belyaev, Oleg. 2012. Aspektual’no-temporal’naja sistema aštynskogo darginskogo [The tense and aspect system in Ashti Dargwa]. Acta Linguistica Petropolitana 6. 181–227.
Belyaev, Oleg. 2013. Optimal agreement at m-structure: Person in Dargwa. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG13 conference, 90–110. Stanford: CSLI Publications. (online available)
Belyaev, Oleg. 2016. Ergative gender agreement in Dargwa: “Backward Control” or feature sharing? In Doug Arnold, Miriam Butt, Berthold Crysmann, Tracy Holloway King & Stefan Müller (eds.), Proceedings of the joint 2016 conference on Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, 83–103. Stanford: CSLI Publications. (online available)
Belyaev, Oleg. 2017. Information structure conditions on the agreement controller in Dargwa. In Miriam Butt & Tracy Holloway King (eds.), Proceedings of the LFG’17 conference, University of Konstanz, 66–82. Stanford: CSLI Publications. (publisher's website)
Forker, Diana. 2018. Sanzhi–Russian code switching and the Matrix Language Frame model. International Journal of Bilingualism 23. 1448–1468. (online available at publisher's website)
Forker, Diana. 2019a. Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond. Linguistic Typology 23. 59–106. (publisher's website)
Forker, Diana. 2019c. Reported speech constructions in Sanzhi Dargwa and their extension to other areas of grammar. Sprachwissenschaft 44. 171–199. (publisher's website)
Ganenkov, Dmitry. 2018. Gender agreement alternation in Aqusha Dargwa: A case against information structure. Studies in Language 42. 529–561. (publisher's website)
Ganenkov, Dmitry. 2021. Person agreement with inherent case DPs in Chirag Dargwa. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 10. 1007/s11049-021-09520-3. (ms online available)
Ganenkov, Dmitry. 2021. Agreement Shift in Embedded Reports. Linguistic Inquiry. 1-50. 10.1162/ling_a_00449. (publisher's website)
Ganenkov, Dmitry. 2020. Missing Elsewhere: Domain Extension in Contextual Allomorphy. Linguistic Inquiry. 51 (4). 785-798. (publisher's website)
van den Berg, Helma. 1999. Gender and person agreement in Akusha Dargi. Folia Linguistica 33. 153–168. (publisher's website)
van den Berg, Helma. 2003c. Spatial prefixes in Dargi (East Caucasian). Acta Linguistica Hungarica 50. 201–225. (online available at publisher's website)
Mutalov, Rasul. 2002. Glagol darginskogo jazyka [The verb in the Dargwa language]. Makhachkala: DSU.
Mutalov, Rasul. 2018. The tense / aspect system of Standard Dargwa. In Diana Forker & Timur Maisak (eds.), The semantics of verbal categories in Nakh-Daghestanian languages: Tense, aspect, evidentiality, mood and modality, 49–79. Leiden: Brill. (publisher's website)
Sumbatova, Nina. 2009. Constituent questions and argument-focus constructions: Some data from the North-Caucasian languages. In Johannes Helmbrecht (ed.), Form and function in language research. Papers in honour of Christian Lehmann, 313–328. Berlin: de Gruyter. (online available)
Sumbatova, Nina. 2011. Person hierarchies and the problem of person marker origin in Dargwa: Facts and diachronic problems. In Gilles Authier & Timur Maisak (eds.), Tense, aspect, modality and finiteness in East Caucasian languages, 131–160. Bochum: Brockmeyer. (online available)

further

see also collection of references in glottolog

lexicon

dictionaries, headword search tools, further sources of information about the lexicon

Jusupov, Khizri A. 2005. Russko-darginskij slovar’ [Russian-Dargwa dictionary]. Makhachkala: Jupiter.
Jusupov, Khizri A. 2017. Darginsko-russikij slovar’ [Dargwa-Russian dictionary]. Makhachkala: Pero.
Abdullaev, Zapir G. 2017. Darginsko-russikij slovar’ [Dargwa-Russian dictionary]. Makhachkala: IJaLI DNC RAN.

texts

corpora of written language, spoken data collections

Forker, Diana & Gadzhimurad Gadzhimuradov. 2017. Sanžinskie skazki i rasskazy [Sanzhi tales and narratives]. Makhachkala.
van den Berg, Helma. 2001. Dargi folktales: Oral stories from the Caucasus and an introduction to Dargi grammar. Leiden: CNWS.