LANGUAGES OF THE CAUCASUS

Indigenous to the Caucasus are three (or four) language families - Kartvelian, North West Caucasian, and North East Caucasian comprising Daghestan and Nakh.

These are apparently not related to Indo-European, Turkic, Semitic or any of the other large language families.

Among them the three indigenous families contain some thirty five to forty languages which are very different from those that surround them.

But in spite of several unusual typological features, these languages have been omitted from much recent work on language universals and have in some cases been seriously misrepresented.