1 Avar Grammar Sketch Diana Forker Submitted to Polinsky, Maria (ed.) Handbook of Caucasian languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1. Language and its speakers Avar (ISO 639-3 ava) is by far the largest indigenous language spoken in Daghestan. The total number of ethnic Avars is around one million, of who live, according to the 2010 census, 912,090 people in the Russian Federation and around 49,800 in Azerbaijan (census data from 2009). Traditionally, Avars have lived in the central and western parts of Daghestan, and there are also Avar communities in northern Azerbaijan and very few in Georgia. Since the last 150 years many Avars migrated to Turkey and to various parts of Russia. Avar can be roughly divided into a northern and a southern dialectal group. Standard (literary) Avar developed from an Avar koiné called bolmac’ (‘МШЦЦШЧ ХКЧРЮКРО’, ПrШЦ bo ‘ЩОШЩХО, sШМТОЭв, МШЦЦЮЧТЭв’ + -l genitive case and mac’ ‘ХКЧРЮКРО’) ЮsОН Лв sЩОКФОrs ШП northern varieties for interdialectal communication, in particular the Hunzakh variety. Avar has also served as lingua franca for other Daghestanian ethnic groups such as Andic and Tsezic people and has left many traces in their languages. A part of the territory where Avar was spoken was under the cultural influence of Georgia, and some inscriptions in Avar with Georgian letters have been found (Alekseev et al 2014: 71). The first dated document of Avar, written with the Arabic script, originates from the 15th century (Aleskeev & Ataev 1997: 20), but a major production of texts started only in the 18 th century when a stable orthography for Avar was developed. This orthography made also use of the Arabic script and was in use until 1928 when Avar, as many other minority languages of the Soviet Union, received a Latin orthography. Finally in 1938 a Cyrillic orthography was introduced, which is still in use today. Avar is one of the 14 official languages of Daghestan. It is taught in schools; there are a number of Avar newspapers and journals, radio and TV programs and nowadays many Internet sites (Wikipedia in Avar, two Avar corpora 1 , Radio Free Europe in Avar 2 , etc.). 2. History of research and documentation Important publications on the Avar language are, among others, von Uslar (1889), Bokarev (1949), Saidov (1967), Charachidzé (1981), Alekseev & Ataev (1998), Madieva (1967, 1981, 2000), Mallaeva (2007), Alekseev et al. (2014) and Gimbatov (Ms). Alekseev (1988) contains a reconstruction of proto-Avar. Most of these works treat Standard Avar as spoken in Daghestan. A notable exception is Charachidzц’s (1981) РrКЦЦКr ШП HЮЧгКФС Avar (that is close to Standard Avar) as spoken by migrants in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. Grammatical sketches in English are Ebeling (1966) and Rudnev (2015; especially Chapter 2). There exists far more literature on Avar, but the publications are almost exclusively in Russian, Avar or Georgian, often somewhat outdated and hardly available to scholars from outside the Caucasus. 1 http://baltoslav.eu/avar/ and http://web-corpora.net/AvarCorpus/. 2 http://www.radioerkenli.com/