In the Pursuit of the Lost Language

Abstract Ubykh, the sister-language of Abkhaz and Circassian, members of the small West-Caucasian linguistic family, is regarded as extinct since the death of its last fully competent speaker, the famous Tevfik Esenç, in 1992. The present paper contains the analysis of the Ubykh linguistic material recorded by the author in Turkey in 1991 from Tevfik Esenç, and in 2009 and 2010 from his younger son Erol, nearly 20 years since his father’s death, including a unique song in this most remarkable and now regrettably extinct language.