| Also Known As: Kapuchin,Kapucha,Bezheta,Bezhita,Bexita,Kupuca,Bechitin,Bezhti
Description:
The Bezhta (or Bezheta) language (Bezhta: бежкьалас миц, bežƛʼalas mic), also known as Kapucha (from the name of a large village), belongs to the Tsezic group of the North Caucasian language family. It is a language spoken by about 10,000 people in southern Dagestan, Russia.
Bezhta can be further divided into three dialects — Bezhta Proper, Tljadali and Hoshar-Hota — which are spoken in various villages in the region. Its closest linguistic relatives are Hunzib, Tsez, Khwarshi and Hinukh. It is also related to the Avar language, but the two are not mutually intelligible. Bezhta is an unwritten language, but various attempts have been made to develop an official orthography for the language. The Bezhta people use Avar as literary language. The first book ever printed in Bezhta was the Gospel of Luke.
Bezhta has a rich consonantal and — unlike its relatives Tsez and Avar — a relatively large vowel inventory (18 distinct vowel phonemes), compared to other languages of the same family.
The Bezhta language is a mostly agglutinative one and the vast amount of locative cases makes its case system particularly rich. The verb morphology is relatively simple, though. It is an ergative..... full article at Wikipedia |
