Editing Northwest Caucasian languages (section)

====Abkhaz====
[[Abkhaz language|Abkhaz]] has 100,000 speakers in [[Abkhazia]] (a ''de facto'' independent republic, but a ''de jure'' autonomous entity within [[Georgia (country)|Georgia]]), where it is the official language, and an unknown number of speakers in [[Turkey]].  It has been a literary language from the beginning of the 20th century. Abkhaz and Abaza may be said to be dialects of the same language, but each preserves phonemes which the other has lost. Abkhaz is characterised by unusual consonant clusters and one of the world's smallest vowel inventories: It has only two distinctive vowels, an open vowel /a/ and a mid vowel /ə/. Next to [[Palatalization (phonetics)|palatalized]] or [[labialization|labialized]] consonants, /a/ is realized as [e] or [o], and /ə/ as [i] or [u]. There are three major [[dialect]]s: [[Abzhuy]] and [[Bzyb dialect|Bzyp]] in [[Abkhazia]] and [[Sadz]] in Turkey.