Ubykh

Ubykh was a Northwest Caucasian language spoken on the northeastern Black Sea coast, in the territory around present-day Sochi, by the Ubykh people, a Circassian group. Among the world’s documented spoken languages it holds a phonological record: an inventory of roughly eighty-four consonants set against only two phonemically distinct vowels — the most lopsided consonant-to-vowel ratio known in any non-click language. To the speakers, this was simply how words were made; to linguists, it became one of the most studied sound systems on earth.

The language did not fade through gradual neglect at home. It was carried out of its homeland by force. In 1864, at the close of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, the Ubykh — together with much of the wider Circassian population — were expelled in a campaign of deportation and mass death now widely described as ethnic cleansing or genocide. The survivors crossed the Black Sea into the Ottoman Empire and settled in scattered villages across Anatolia.

Uprooted and dispersed, Ubykh had no territory in which to renew itself. Within a few generations its speakers shifted to Turkish and to the more numerous Circassian language Adyghe. By the twentieth century the language survived in only a handful of elderly speakers, and finally in one.

That last fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died on 7 October 1992 in the village of Haci Osman, Turkey. Because he had worked patiently for decades with linguists who recorded his speech in detail, Ubykh became one of the best-documented extinct languages in the world — a language that ceased to be spoken but continues to exist, in a sense, on paper and on tape.