about 100.000 native speakers in the Abkhaz Autonomous Republic in western Georgia
also spoken in southwestern Georgia, Ukraine, Turkey and Syria
Typological Information
polyconsonantal: Standard Abkhaz counts 58 phonemic consonants and two phonemic vowels
ergativity
agglutinative
majority of grammatical information is expressed on the verb - 'verbocentric language' (Chirikba 2003: 22); polysynthetic and complex verb morphology
SOV
Reduplication Form-Function
full echo word formation: noun: pluralization ("X and so on/all kinds of X") echo word formation: verb - adverb: word class derivation