A Language With Eighty-Four Consonants Died in 1992

Tevfik Esenç died in his village of Hacı Osman, in the Manyas district of northwestern Türkiye, on 7 October 1992. He was 88. With him went the last fluency in Ubykh, a language of the northwestern Caucasus that for most of the 20th century existed only in the heads of a few old men in Anatolia. The Ubykhs had been driven out of their homeland on the Black Sea coast in 1864, when Russia completed its conquest of Circassia, and resettled in scattered Turkish villages. Their language did not survive the move past three generations.

Ubykh's most peculiar feature is its inventory. Linguists generally credit it with 84 distinct consonants — pharyngealized, labialized, glottalized, ejective, all of them load-bearing — and only two phonemic vowels, which alternate based on adjacent consonants. By contrast English has roughly 24 consonants and a dozen vowels. Ubykh is what happens when a language puts almost all its information into the way a consonant is articulated rather than the way a vowel sounds.

From the late 1950s onward Esenç worked patiently with the French Caucasologist Georges Dumézil and a handful of other researchers — Hans Vogt, Georges Charachidzé, George Hewitt, Sumru Özsoy. He recorded folktales, paradigms, vocabulary, prayers. His tombstone in Hacı Osman bears a sentence in Ubykh, and an inscription that translates roughly: "This is the grave of Tevfik Esenç. He was the last man able to speak the language they called Ubykh."

The recordings still play. Nobody listening to them today fully understands.