Lak

Abstract

This chapter gives a grammatical overview of the Kumukh dialect of Lak, which is the basis of the Lak standard language, which is one of the offical languages of the Republic of Daghestan in the Russian Federation. Lak is a member of the Dagestanian branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian (Northeast) Caucasian family and is spoken by close to 200,000 people, mostly in the central highlands of Daghestan. Topics of interest covered in this chapter include glottalization and gemination in stops and affricates, pharyngealized vowels, agglutination, exuberant gender agreement, Lak’s complex tense-aspect-mood-evidential system, ergative and biabsolutive agreement patterns, and long-distance anaphora wherein a reflexive in a subordinate clause can refer to the absolutive or ergative (= genitive) subject of the main clause. Among Daghestanian languages, Lak is also remarkable for the fact that its dialectal differentiation is not as strong as in other Daghestanian branches, especially its closest relative, Dargwa.