Ubykh language
Ubykh or Päkhy is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, a subgroup of Circassians who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to the Ottoman Empire in the Circassian genocide.
| Ubykh | |
|---|---|
| tuex̂ıbze | |
| Pronunciation | /tʷɜxɨbzɜ/ |
| Native to | Circassia |
| Region | Sochi |
| Ethnicity | Ubykh |
| Extinct | 7 October 1992, with the death of Tevfik Esenç |
Northwest Caucasian
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | uby |
| Glottolog | ubyk1235 |
Ubykh (extinct) | |
Ubykh is an extinct language according to the classification system of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger | |
The Ubykh language was ergative and polysynthetic, with a high degree of agglutination, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants but only two phonemically distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants, it had one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, and the largest number for any language without clicks.
The name Ubykh is derived from Убыхыбзэ (/wɨbɨx/), its name in the Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Oubykh (French); and its Germanised variant Päkhy (from Ubykh /tʷɜχɨ/).