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:
“Now stamp the Lord’s Prayer on a grain of rice,
A Bible-leaved of all the written woods
Strip to this tree: a rocking alphabet,
Genesis in the root, the scarecrow word,
And one light’s language in the book of trees.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school was taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen—but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)