Avar

AbstractThis chapter provides a grammatical sketch of Avar, the largest indigenous language of Dagestan. Avar has five vowels and more than 40 consonants, among which there are a number of voiced, voiceless, ejective (glottalized), and tense (strong) obstruents. The language is agglutinative with some elements of fusion and strongly suffixing. Nouns are divided into three genders, and three inflectional classes, which largely correlate with the gender divisions. The core cases are absolutive, ergative, dative and genitive; furthermore, there are twenty spatial cases. Avar has gender and number agreement expressed by prefixes, suffixes, and occasionally infixes. Agreement targets are mainly verbs, adjectives, and certain pronouns. While agreement and case marking follow ergative alignment, no ergative patterns are found outside the realm of morphology. The rich inventory of verb forms consists of four synthetic and six analytic core tenses used in finite clauses. The non-finite verb forms include infinitive, masdar, and a wide range of participles and converbs. Noun phrases and subordinate clauses are head-final. In main clauses there is a clear tendency for A-P-V order, but other orders are also attested.