The Origin of the Chechen and Ingush: A Study in Alpine Linguistic and Ethnic Geography

Abstract

A general model is proposed for language and dialect spreads and population movement in mountain societies. Languages (and societies) are ver- tically distributed and often discontinuous. Isoglosses and language spreads move downhill during warm periods and uphill during cold periods. Population movements go in the opposite direction. The ethnic scope and degree of mytho- logization of origin legends correlate well with chronology and vertical direc- tionality of movements, so that even highly mythologized legends are reliable evidence of movements. This model is demonstrated on the ethnolinguistic history of the Chechen and Ingush peoples of the central Caucasus. 1. Introduction. Mountains are as distinctive linguistically as they are geographically and biologically. When inhabited by settled farming and herding people, they harbor unusual diversity of language families and grammatical structures relative to nearby lowlands. The considerable ecological diversity of mountain landscapes varies vertically, and well-adapted societies take advan- tage of it by spanning a large vertical range and practicing transhumance at least to some extent. Verticality of social and economic organization leads to verticality of linguistic distributions and language spreads, a fact which has not been fully utilized in tracing the linguistic and ethnic prehistory of the Caucasus. This article reviews the evidence from linguistics, folklore, and historical climatology for the linguistic and ethnic origins of the Chechen and Ingush, neighboring peoples speaking closely related languages of the Nakh branch of the Nakh-Daghestanian or East Caucasian family.1 Nakh languages are now spoken chiefly on the north slope of the Caucasus, but outliers on the south slope and other evidence testify to a former Nakh presence there as well. All forms of evidence point rather consistently to an ultimate origin of Proto-Nakh on the southern Caucasus slope and a dispersal of Chechen-Ingush in the southern highlands. Linguistic and historical works on the Caucasus have generally seen the central Caucasian highlands as a place of disadvantage and retreat, occupied as a refuge from lowland powers (chiefly the Golden Horde, which ruled the steppe to the north), under constant pent-up population pressure, and abandoned for the lowlands at the first opportunity (e.g., Anchabadze and Volkova 1993:64-82; Arsaxanov 1969:16; Desheriev 1963:15; Jandieva 1999:52; Muzhuxoev 1995:9, 21; and many other sources). In this view a large-scale descent, or even return, of highlanders to the lowlands began in the sixteenth century after the defeat of the Golden Horde by Russia.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.