Ubykh

Ubykh (tʷaχəbzɜ, literally “the Ubykh language”) was a Northwest Caucasian language formerly spoken near Sochi on the northeastern Black Sea coast. After the Russian conquest and mass expulsion of 1864, Ubykh communities resettled in the Ottoman Empire and increasingly shifted to Turkish; the death of the last fully fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, on 7 October 1992 is conventionally treated as the language’s extinction. Descriptions generally analyze about eighty consonant phonemes but only two basic vowel phonemes, although the exact analysis varies. Ubykh had no widely adopted community orthography, so surviving texts and recordings use linguistic transcription. Georges Dumézil began documenting the language in 1929, and work by him, Esenç, Hans Vogt, and others preserves extensive linguistic and oral-literary material.