Introduction to the Special Issue on Caucasian Languages

Our main goal in organizing the workshop and in editing the current issue is to bring together young linguists working on the relatively less studied Caucasian languages, and to offer them a forum for the exchange of ideas, for comparison of data and of different methods of analysis, as well as for potential future collaborations. Unlike many other linguistic areas or language families, the linguistic study of the Caucasus seems to proceed with interruptions, alternating between periods of higher and lower activity, determined by a complex interaction of factors. To name just a few: the unsettled political situation in the area, the variable depth of linguistic tradition and formal study of language in different countries of the Caucasus, the status of a given language as a majority or minority language, the presence or absence of orthography, of literacy, of written vs. oral cultural tradition. A gap is noticeable even in the current issue. Of the three existing Caucasian language families, the Northeast (Nakh-Daghestanian) and the South (Kartvelian) families are well represented, with three articles each, but the Northwest family happens to be missing

Linguistics · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · Philosophy

• The Rise and Fall and Revival of the Ibero-Caucasian Hypothesis

  Kevin Tuite•Historiographia Linguistica•2008

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• Linguistic Diversity in the Caucasus

  Bernard Comrie•Annual Review of Anthropology•2008

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