Chechnya Day

Apparently, it's Chechnya Day today - commemmorating Stalin's expulsion in 1944 of the entire Chechen people from their homeland to Central Asia (along with a number of other minority groups, such as the Kalmyks). Something like half the population died en route. The survivors were not permitted to return for more than ten years.

So, marking the occasion, here are some Chechen language links:

• Chechen - Johanna Nichols
  
• Scanned Chechen language materials online (possibly illegal, but very helpful)

Like most Caucasian languages, it's quite interesting, with no known relatives outside the Caucasus, a complex gender system, and a remarkably large set of phonemes. Its language family, Northeast Caucasian, may be the closest living relative of two long-extinct languages once written in cuneiform north of the Fertile Crescent, Hurrian and Urartian.