Ubykh

Ubykh (tʷaχəbzɜ, literally "Ubykh-language"; Ubykh self-designation tʷaχ) is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language whose last fully fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died on 7 October 1992 in the village of Hacıosman (Manyas district, Balıkesir Province, Turkey). Ubykh held the largest documented consonant inventory of any living language until Esenç's death — Dumézil and Vogt count 84 consonants, including five-way contrasts at several places of articulation (plain, voiced, ejective, labialized, palatalized) and a rich set of pharyngealized and uvular series — paired with just 2 phonemic vowels (a, ə), the smallest vowel system in any natural language. The Ubykhs originally inhabited the NE coast of the Black Sea around the modern city of Sochi; following the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in 1864 they were deported en masse to Ottoman Anatolia, where the language survived for four generations before being lost. Ubykh was never written in a community orthography; all documentation is in linguists' transcriptions, principally those of Georges Dumézil (from 1929 onwards) and Hans Vogt (whose 1963 dictionary remains the standard reference).