A Short Grammar of East Circassian (Kabardian)

This grammar should be used with some caution, not only because it was written by a linguist who is far from being a fluent speaker of Kabardian. It is largely compilatory in nature, and many examples were drawn from the existing works on Kabardian by M. L. Abitov, Mukhadin Kumakhov, and others. However, I have also excerpted and analyzed many sentences from the literature, especially from the Nart corpus (Nārtxar, 1951, Nārtxar, 2001), and some examples were elicited from native speakers. Although I have relied heavily on the published scholarly works on Kabardian, my interpretations of the data are sometimes very different from those in the available literature. I have tried to approach the Kabardian language from a typological point of view, comparing its linguistic features, that may appear strange to speakers of Indo-European languages, to similar features found in other languages of the world.