Language
Although there is sparse knowledge about the Avar language, if there was some original Avar (Ur-Avar) language, scholars generally posit that the extinct language of the Eurasian Avars belonged to the Oghuric group, showing both strong similarities and discernable differences to Common Turkic. Today, Chuvash is thought to represent the last remaining branch of Oghuric. How well modern Chuvash represents archaic Oghuric remains speculative. Chuvash itself is not intelligible by speakers of Common Turkic, despite having undergone significant degrees of Turkicization in recent centuries.
Whatever the 'original' languages of the various Avar groups, Slavic was adopted as the dominant language of the Avar khaganate.
Read more about this topic: Eurasian Avars
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)
“The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.”
—Elias Canetti (b. 1905)