1 Evidentiality in Nakh-Daghestanian languages Diana Forker diana.forker@uni-bamberg.de 1. Introduction The Nakh-Daghestanian (or East Caucasian) language family is the largest and the most diverse of the three autochthonous language families in the Caucasus, the other two being West Caucasian and Kartvelian (or South Caucasian). The more than 30 Nakh-Daghestanian languages are spoken in the southern parts of Russia, in northern Azerbaijan and in a few speech communities are found in Georgia. The family can be divided into several subbranches: Nakh (Chechen, Ingush, Tsova-Tush), Avar-Andic (Avar, Andi, Godoberi, Bagvalal, and some more), Tsezic (Tsez, Hinuq, Khwarshi, Hunzib, and Bezhta), Lezgic (Lezgian, Agul, Tsakhur, Tabasaran, Kryz, Rutul, Budukh, Archi, and Udi), Khinalugh (sometimes grouped together with Lezgic), Dargi (traditionally considered to be one language, but consisting of several varieties that are mutually incomprehensible), and Lak (sometimes grouped together with Dargi). The largest language of this family is Chechen with more than one million speakers and enjoying official status in the Autonomous Republics of Chechnya and Daghestan. Yet most of the Nakh-Daghestanian languages are rather small and exclusively used for oral communication within the village, e.g. Hinuq, Archi or many Dargi varieties. From a typological point of view, the languages have rather large consonant inventories, including ejectives and pharyngealization. Their morphology is agglutinating / fusional and the complexity strongly varies from language to language, with Ingush being the most complex, Lezgian the simplest language according to Nichols (2013). 1 The languages are predominantly dependent-marking with rich case inventories, including ergative case and usually a vast array of spatial cases. In most of the Nakh-Daghestanian languages gender is an important grammatical category that turns up as gender/number marking on verbs and other parts of speech triggered by the absolutive argument. The languages have rich inventories of finite and non-finite verb forms (converbs, participles, infinite, and masdar -- a deverbal noun). Common valency classes are: (i) intransitive (having one single argument in the absolutive), (ii) extended intransitive (one absolutive argument and a further argument in a spatial case), (iii) transitive (one absolutive and one ergative argument), (iv) extended transitive (one absolutive, one ergative and one further argument in the dative or a spatial case), and (v) affective (one experiencer argument in the dative or a spatial case and one stimulus argument in the absolutive). The most common constituent orders are SV 1 Nichols measures the overall complexity, including phonology, morphology and syntax.