Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language and is thus related to Adyghe. It is especially close to Abaza, and they are sometimes considered dialects of the same language, Abazgi, of which the literary dialects of Abkhaz

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There is not an agreed number of speakers of Abkhaz, and there are widely different numbers. It is agreed that today most of the Abkhaz

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The earliest indisputable extant written records of the Abkhaz language are in the Arabic script, recorded by the Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebiin the 17th century. Abkhaz has been used as

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Classification
Abkhaz is generally viewed as having three major dialects:
• Abzhywa,

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Typical of Northwest Caucasian languages, Abkhaz is an agglutinative language that relies heavily on affixation. It has an ergative-absolutivetypology, such that the subject of an

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Both Georgian and Abkhaz law enshrines an official status of the Abkhaz language in Abkhazia.
The 1992 law of Georgia,

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Consonants
Abkhaz has a very large number of consonants (58 in the literary dialect), with three-way voiced/voiceless/ejective and palatalized/labialized/plain distinctions. By contrast, the language has only two phonemically distinct

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