| Chirag | |
| Nativename: | хьаргънилла xarʁnilla kub |
| States: | North Caucasus |
| Region: | Agulsky District, Dagestan |
| Speakers: | 2,000 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| Ref: | [1] |
| Familycolor: | Caucasian |
| Fam1: | Northeast Caucasian |
| Fam2: | Dargin |
| Glotto: | chir1284 |
| Glottorefname: | Chirag |
| Map: | Dargwa_map_%28Koryakov%29_2021.png |
Chirag (Chirag: хьаргънилла, xarʁnilla kub[2]) is a language in the Dargin dialect continuum spoken in Dagestan, Russia. It is spoken around the village of Chirag, but some speakers have moved to Kaspiysk. Chirag is often considered a divergent dialect of Dargwa,[3] despite not being mutually intelligible with literary Dargwa.[4] Ethnologue lists it under the dialects of Dargwa but recognizes that it may be a separate language.[5]
Based on lexical similarity, Chirag is usually classified as a separate language from other varieties of Dargwa.[6] It has 67% lexical similarity with the North-Central group, 77.6% with the South group, and 69% with Kaitag; within the South group, it has 84% lexical similarity with Qunqi Amuq.[6]
Chirag has four vowels: pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, pronounced as /link/, and pronounced as /link/,[7] along with two "epiglottalized" vowels, pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/. Vowel length also exists for most vowels.
In Chirag, stressed syllables are specified for tone.[8]
Chirag has some phonological processes that pertain to specific morphological elements. The plural suffix -e attracts stress and induces vowel deletion on the final syllable of disyllabic nouns (e.g., qisqan 'spider', qisqne 'spiders').[9] Verbal prefixes have optional front/back vowel harmony.
The permitted syllable structures are CV, CVC, and CVRT.
Chirag is head-final, has fairly flexible word order and is rich with inflectional morphology.[10] It has ergative–absolutive alignment in its case marking; the subject of a transitive verb is overtly marked with ergative case, and the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb are unmarked:[1] [10]
There are three noun classes, being male, female, and neuter. In the plutal form, however, the male and female classes are identical, thus leading to a two-way human-nonhuman opposition.[11]
Due to the proximity of Chirag to Aghul, Lak, and Lezgin, it has some loanwords from these languages, such as марххале ("snow", derived from Lak марххале).
There are efforts to enable automated translation of text from English to Chirag.[12]