Tindi

Brief Information

Tindi is spoken in several villages of the Tsumada district of Dagestan, as well as in the resettlement villages in the lowland area.

In the 1939 census, Tindi people have officially been registered as Avars. Therefore, it is difficult to determine the exact number of the Tindi speakers in the context of intensive migration of the population. It is approximately more than twenty thousand people. According to the 2010 census, the number of the Tindi speakers is about 9300 thousand people.

Tindi does not have a strong dialect differentiation. The differences between the dialects mainly concern the phonetic differences. There are two dialect groups: Tindi-Echeda and Angida-Aknada. Tindi was also knows as Tindal and Ideri. The Tindi people do not have a general ethnic name. They call themselves, respectively, by the names of their villages. Close neighbors, Chamalals, Bagvalals and Avars, call them by the name of the largest village – Tindi. 

The traditional occupations of the Tindi people are agriculture, cattle breeding, beekeeping, and hunting. All Tindi people are Sunni Muslims.

Genealogy

Tindi belongs to the Andic group of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family.

 

Distribution

 

 

Tindi is spoken in the villages of the Tsumada district of Dagestan, as well as in the resettlement villages in the flat part.

Dialects and their distribution

Language contacts and multilingualism

Currently, the Tindi people speak Avar and Russian. 

Language functioning

Tindi has no official status.

Tindi is an unwritten language. Tindi does not have an officially established writing system.

Tindi has no established literary standard. The native speakers of different dialects speak their own dialects with each other.

Dynamics of language usage

Tindi remains the primary means of communication among the Tindi people, despite the fact that most Tindi identity themselves as Avar. At the same time, the knowledge of Avar among the Tindi people is decreasing every year due to the spread of mass media (television, radio, press, etc.) in Russian. Nowadays, the knowledge of Russian is almost absolute.

The knowledge of Tindi is considerably high in compact living areas. In general, the transmission of Tindi to the children is maintained. The level of proficiency of Tindi amongst the youngest generation living in urban areas is decreasing.  

 

Language structure

Phonetics

Tindi has 20 vowels and 46 consonants.

Learn more

Morphology

Tindi is agglutinative with fusional and analytic elements.

Learn more

Syntax

Tindi is classified as the language with ergative–absolutive alignment. The basic word order is SOV, but in general the word order is free.

Learn more

Vocabulary

The Avar, Arabic, Persian, Russian and Turkic languages are the main sources of word borrowing.

Learn more

Исследование языка

Important studies on Tindi are in Gudava [1953], [1954], and 1969.  The first Tindi dictionary is by Magomedova (2003).

Language experts

Gilles Authier

Gilles Authier is actively studying the morphology and syntax of Tindi. 

Core references

Grammatical descriptions: grammars, sketches

Authier, G. (2020). Tindi (Y. Koryakov & T. Maisak, Eds.). Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Gudava, T. 1953. Foneticheskij obzor tindinskogo jazyka. Tbilisi.
Gudava, T. 1954. K istorii grammaticheskix klassov v tindinskom jazyke. Tbilisi.

Magomedbekova, Z. M. (1998). Tindinskij jazyk [Tindi]. In Mixail E. Alekseev, G. A. Klimov, S. A. Starostin, & J. G. Testelec (Eds.), Jazyki mira. Kavkazskie jazyki [Languages of the world. Caucasian languages] (pp. 25–32). Moscow: Academia.

Magomedova, P. T. (2012). Tindinskij jazyk [Tindi]. Makhachkala: IJaLI.

 

Dictionaries

Magomedova, P. T. (2003). Tindinsko-russkij slovarʹ [Tindi-Russian dictionary]. Makhachkala: IJaLI.

Работы по этнологии

Magomedxanov M. M., Musaeva M. K. 2009. Tindaly (ethnographical sketch XIX-XX cc.)

Resources

Corpora and text collections

There is no publicly available electronic corpus of Tindi. 

Other electronic resources

Tindi wordlist
IDS The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (Серия межконтинентальных словарей)

The Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS), which is a database with lexical material, contains wordlists of Tindi —1584 entries. 

Data for this page kindly provided by

Zaira Madzhidovna Khalilova (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow).

References used:

Authier, G. (2020). Tindi (Y. Koryakov & T. Maisak, Eds.). Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Magomedbekova, Z. M. (1998). Tindinskij jazyk [Tindi]. In Mixail E. Alekseev, G. A. Klimov, S. A. Starostin, & J. G. Testelec (Eds.), Jazyki mira. Kavkazskie jazyki [Languages of the world. Caucasian languages] (pp. 25–32). Moscow: Academia.

Magomedova, P. T. (2003). Tindinsko-russkij slovarʹ [Tindi-Russian dictionary]. Makhachkala: IJaLI.

Magomedova, P. T. (2012). Tindinskij jazyk [Tindi]. Makhachkala: IJaLI.

Photos

Тиндинские поговорки

Приложение к тексту "Тиндинские поговорки"