Editing Northwest Caucasian languages (section)

== Main features ==

=== Phonetics ===

[[Linguistic reconstruction]]s suggest that both the richness of the consonantal systems and the poverty of the vocalic systems may be the result of a historical process, whereby vowel features such as [[labialization]] and [[Palatalization (phonetics)|palatalization]] were reassigned to adjacent consonants. For example, ancestral {{IPA|*/ki/}} may have become {{IPA|/kʲə/}} and {{IPA|*/ku/}} may have become {{IPA|/kʷə/}}, losing the old vowels {{IPA|*/i/}} and {{IPA|*/u/}} but gaining the new consonants {{IPA|/kʲ/}} and {{IPA|/kʷ/}}. The linguist [[John Colarusso]] has further postulated that some instances of this may also be due to the levelling of an old [[noun class|grammatical class]] prefix system (so {{IPA|*/w-ka/}} may have become {{IPA|/kʷa/}}), on the basis of pairs like Ubykh {{IPA|/ɡʲə/}} vs. Kabardian and Abkhaz {{IPA|/ɡʷə/}} ''heart''. This same process is claimed by some{{who|date=June 2020}} to lie behind the development of [[labialized velar consonant|labiovelars]] in [[Proto-Indo-European language|Proto-Indo-European]], which once neighboured [[Proto-Northwest Caucasian language|Proto-NWC]].

==== Lack of distinctive vowels and wealth of distinctive consonants ====

The entire family is characterised by a paucity of [[phoneme|phonemic]] vowels (two or three, depending upon the analysis) coupled with rich consonantal systems that include many forms of [[secondary articulation]].<ref name=EB/> [[Ubykh language|Ubykh (Ubyx)]], for example, had two vowels and probably the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern [[Africa]].

===Grammar===
Northwest Caucasian languages have rather simple noun systems, with only a handful of cases at the most, coupled with highly [[agglutination|agglutinative]] verbal systems that can contain almost the entire syntactic structure of the sentence. All finite verbs are marked for agreement with three arguments: [[absolutive case|absolutive]], [[ergative case|ergative]], and [[indirect object]],<ref>Nichols, Johanna (1986)</ref> and there are also a wide range of [[applicative voice|applicative constructions]]. There is a split between "dynamic" and "stative" [[verb]]s, with dynamic verbs having an especially complex morphology. A verb's morphemes indicate the subject's and object's person, place, time, manner of action, negative, and other types of grammatical categories.

All Northwest Caucasian languages are [[left-branching language|left-branching]], so that the verb comes at the end of the sentence and modifiers such as [[relative clauses]] precede a noun.

Northwest Caucasian languages do not generally permit more than one finite verb in a sentence, which precludes the existence of [[subordinate clause]]s in the [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] sense. Equivalent functions are performed by extensive arrays of [[noun|nominal]] and [[participle|participial]] non-finite verb forms, though Abkhaz appears to be developing limited subordinate clauses, perhaps under the influence of Russian.