#ingush

Dzhabagiyev Magomet-Girey Yeldzhiyevich (1877-1937) - public and political figure, agronomist, ethnographer and folklorist, was a member of the Central Committee of the Union of United Highlanders of the Caucasus and was the chairman of the Ingush National Council (1918). Created the first Ingush alphabet in 1889. Led the Society for the Education of the Ingush People (1917). Was the president of the Union of Highlanders of the Caucasus (1931).

Ingush (гӀалгӀай мотт)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 306,000

Official language: Ingushetia (Russia)

Language of diaspora: Belgium, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Norway, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan

Script: Cyrillic, 46 letters

Grammatical cases: 8

Linguistic typology: fusional, SVO

Language family: Northeast Caucasian, Nakh, Vainakh

Number of dialects: 1

History

beginning of the 20th century - Arabic-based writing system

1917 - Latin alphabet

1938 - introduction of the Cyrillic alphabet

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: а аь б в г гӀ д е ё ж з и й к кх къ кӀ л м н о п пӀ р с т тӀ у ф х хь хӀ ц цӀ ч чӀ ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я яь Ӏ.

The letters ё, щ, ъ, ы, and ь are only used in Russian loanwords and names. 

Most words have the stress in the first syllable.

Grammar

Nouns have gender or class, two numbers (singular and plural) and eight cases (nominative, genitive, dative, ergative, allative, instrumental, lative, and comparison). Gender takes two forms, agreement gender and overt inherent gender.

Ingush uses a vigesimal numeral system in which numbers lower than twenty are base-ten, but the rest are base-twenty.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, and optative), evidentiality, gender, person, and number. 

An interesting characteristic is that Ingush is a nominative-accusative language syntactically, even though it has ergative morphology.

Dialects