Tiếng Tsez

Tsez (autonymously Цез мец, also called Dido) is a Northeast Caucasian language of the Tsezic branch, spoken by around 15,000 people in the Tsuntinsky District of the Republic of Dagestan, Russia, near the Georgian border. Linguistically, Tsez is famous in linguistic typology for having one of the largest case inventories in the world — approximately 64 case forms when counting all the spatial-orientational paradigms — used by typologists Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky as a benchmark example for "extreme" agglutinative case morphology. Other features include ergative-absolutive alignment, large consonant inventories with pharyngealization and ejectives, and noun class agreement (4 classes). Tsez has historically been an unwritten language, with the post-Soviet era seeing the development of community Cyrillic orthographies based on Avar conventions, but no major literary tradition exists.