Dargwa Alphabet

Dargwa, also called Dargin (in the language itself дарган мез, dargan mez), has been written in Cyrillic since 1938. Its alphabet counts 46 letters: 33 single letters, from А а to Я я, and thirteen digraphs that Dargwa treats as letters of their own. Each digraph is a base letter followed by ъ, ь or the stick Ӏ, and in dictionaries it sorts right after its base letter.

The thirteen are Гъ, Гь, ГӀ, Къ, Кь, КӀ, ПӀ, ТӀ, Хъ, Хь, ХӀ, ЦӀ and ЧӀ. The digraphs need no letter shapes of their own, which is why the grid on this page holds the 33 single letters plus Ӏ: everything else is built from them. Letters such as Ё ё, Щ щ and Ф ф appear mostly in words borrowed from Russian.

The written standard is based on the dialect of Akusha in central Dagestan. Before Cyrillic, Dargwa was written for centuries in Arabic script, then from 1928 to 1938 in a Latin alphabet. Cyrillic is what schools, the press, books and signs use today.

What the Dargwa letters ГӀ, ХӀ, КӀ and ПӀ write

Dargwa is a Northeast Caucasian language, and like its neighbours it has a large set of consonants, many of them written with digraphs. ГӀ гӀ is a voiced pharyngeal sound, the one Arabic writes with ʿayn, and ХӀ хӀ is the voiceless pharyngeal fricative of Arabic ḥāʾ, as in хӀу, the Dargwa word for you. Гь гь is a plain h, and Гъ гъ a voiced sound made at the back of the mouth, near a French r.

КӀ, ПӀ, ТӀ, ЦӀ and ЧӀ are ejectives: k, p, t, ts and ch said with a sharp pop from a closed throat. Dargwa has ПӀ, which Avar uses in literary text but does not include in its official alphabet; Avar's lateral letters Лъ and ЛӀ are not part of the Dargwa alphabet. Хь is the ch of Scottish loch, and Къ, Кь and Хъ write k- and q-like sounds made further back in the mouth.

Because one stick or sign changes the consonant, it can also change the word: a Dargwa text typed without Ӏ, ъ or ь is not just untidy, it is often hard to read.

How to type the palochka Ӏ

The palochka (Russian палочка, little stick) is U+04C0 Ӏ; its small form ӏ is U+04CF. Dargwa print normally uses the tall Ӏ inside lowercase words too, so if you need just one, copy Ӏ. The same character is used by Avar, Chechen, Ingush, Lezghian, Kabardian, Adyghe and other Caucasian languages.

Russian keyboards have no palochka key, so many people type a Latin capital I, a lowercase l or the digit 1 instead. It looks alike, but search, sorting and spell-check treat it as a different character, so a search for a word typed with a Latin I will not find the same word spelled with Ӏ.

Windows: in Microsoft Word type 04C0 and press Alt + X; elsewhere copy it from here. Mac: add the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 04C0. Linux: Ctrl + Shift + U, then 4c0 and Enter. HTML: Ӏ for Ӏ and ӏ for ӏ. On a phone, save Ӏ as a text shortcut or copy it here. For the rest of the alphabet, including ъ and ь, any Russian keyboard layout works.

Where the Dargin language is spoken

Dargwa is the language of the Dargins of Dagestan, the Russian republic on the Caspian Sea in the North Caucasus. CLDR estimates around 370,000 speakers; the 2021 Russian census counted 362,156 people reporting Dargwa proficiency. Their homeland is the mountains and foothills of central Dagestan, around villages such as Akusha, Levashi and Kubachi and the coastal town of Izberbash, and many Dargins live in Makhachkala and in Stavropol Krai to the north-west.

Dargwa is not one uniform speech. Linguists often speak of a Dargwa group of languages: the varieties of Kubachi, Kaitag or Sanzhi differ so much from Akusha that their speakers may need the standard language or Russian to understand one another. Nearly all Dargwa speakers also speak Russian, and prices are written in rubles, ₽.

Dargwa's neighbours have their own collections: Avar and Lezghian, also Northeast Caucasian and written with the palochka; Chechen and Ingush, more distant Nakh relatives; Kumyk, the Turkic language of Dagestan's lowlands; and Russian. The flag and emoji of the country are in the Russia collection 🇷🇺.