The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus

This book is an introduction to and overview of the languages of the Caucasus, including those of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. This region of the world exhibits extremely high linguistic diversity, and many of the languages spoken in the Caucasus have cross-linguistically rare features that are found in few or no other languages. This handbook serves as a comprehensive overview with detailed descriptions of languages as well as theoretically oriented chapters.

The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus is an introduction to and overview of the linguistically diverse languages of southern Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Though the languages of the Caucasus have often been mischaracterized or exoticized, many of them have cross-linguistically rare features found in few or no other languages.This handbook presents facts and descriptions of the languages written by experts. The first half of the book is an introduction to the languages, with the linguistic profiles enriched by demographic research about their speakers. It features overviews of the main language families as well as detailed grammatical descriptions of several individual languages. The second half of the book delves more deeply into theoretical analyses of features, such as agreement, ellipsis, and discourse properties, which are found in some languages of the Caucasus. Promising areas for future research are highlighted throughout the handbook, which will be of interest to linguists of all subfields.