Lak language

Infobox Language
name=Lak
nativename=лакку маз ("lakku maz")
region=Southern Dagestan
speakers=120,000
script=Cyrillic (Lak variant)
familycolor=Caucasian
fam1=North Caucasian (controversial)
fam2=Northeast Caucasian
iso2=cau|iso3=lbe

Lak language (лакку маз, "lakku maz") is the language of the Lak people from the Russian autonomous republic of Dagestan, where it is one of six literary languages. It is spoken by over 150,000 people and belongs to the Nakh-Daghestanian branch of North Caucasian languages. In the past it was also referred to as Гьази-Кьумукь ("Hazi-Q’umuq’"), which was transliterated via Russian as Кази-Кумук ("Kazi-Kumuk") or Каси-Кумук ("Kasi-Kumuk"). The literary standard is based on the dialect of the city of Kumuk. This city should not be confused with the Turkic Kumyk ethnic group also present in the Caucasus. Other major dialects are the Arakul, Shadnin, Khosrekh, and Vitskhi (Wicxi, Vicxi) dialects.

Until 1928, the Arabic script was used to display the language. Afterwards it was written in the Latin script for ten years, and since 1938 it has been written with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Lak has throughout the centuries adopted a number of loan words from Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Russian. Ever since Dagestan was part of the USSR, the largest portion of loanwords have come from Russian, especially political and technical vocabulary.

There is a newspaper and broadcasting station in Lak.

Orthography

External links

* [http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/Lak.htm Lak Grammar by Wolfgang Schulze]
* [http://www.writingsystems.net/languages/lak/index.htm Lak writing systems]
* [http://www.lakia.net/ "Lak House"] — Lak culture and society site
* [http://lakia.fastbb.ru/ "Лакку Билаят"] — Lak national forum