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Nakh-Dagestanian languages
This chapter provides an overview of the basic properties of the languages of the Nakh-Dagestanian (East Caucasian) family. Given the size of the family, we cannot cover even the most typical features in full here, let alone describe details of the variation that exists. Likewise, we cannot do full justice to all individual languages or even branches within the family and must instead confine the discussion to occasional mentions of languages and branches here and there. The goal of this chapter is to complement the body of previously published surveys of the family and its branches, such as van den Berg (2005b), Bokarev and Lomtatidze (1967), Klimov and Alekseev (1980), Smeets (1994), Alekseev (1998b), Hewitt (2004), and Job (2004), and to provide a state-of-the-art update on the major issues in the grammar of Nakh-Dagestanian. Where appropriate, we refer the reader to other chapters in this volume or to existing family- or branch-wide overview studies of specific phenomena. For reasons of space, however, we do not provide references to individual grammatical descriptions, except when citing examples from the literature. Examples without references are drawn from our own fieldwork.