Native to Azerbaijan Ethnicity 1,000 (1990) ISO 639-3 bdk | Region Quba Rayon Native speakers 200 (2010) | |
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Language family Northeast Caucasian
Lezgic
Samur
Southern Samur
Budukh | ||
Budukh or Budugh is a Samur language of the Northeast Caucasian language family spoken in parts of the Quba Rayon of Azerbaijan. It is spoken by about 200 of approximately 1,000 ethnic Budukhs.
Contents
Budukh is a severely endangered language, and classified as such by UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.
Gender and agreement
Authier (2010) reports that Budugh has six 'gender-number' classes:
Verbs normally agree with their absolutive argument (intransitive subject or transitive object) in gender. In the following examples, the verb 'beat' shows animate agreement with 'donkey' and non-human plural agreement with 'donkeys'.
Compare these examples with the following, where the verb agrees with the intransitive subject:
Verb agreement
Budukh verbs typically agree with a single argument, the absolutive. In the agreement paradigms, the majority of verbs show no overt agreement for the masculine, neuter, and nonhuman plural. Consider the following paradigm for the verb 'keep' in the perfective (Authier 2009):
In this paradigm, /ˤa/ is a preverb which must appear with the verb root /q/ 'keep', and the agreement morphology appears between the preverb and the root. Due to historical changes, the relationships between the various members of an agreement paradigm are often more complex and show changes of vowel and/or consonant. The following perfective paradigm for 'go' shows this (with the reconstructed form shown after the *)
Word order
Budukh is an SOV language, as seen in the following example:
It has possessors before possessed nouns:
Adjectives appear before the nouns that they modify: