Dagestanian

Dagestanian is a term for the branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family concentrated within Dagestan in the North Caucasus, traditionally treated as the family's other half alongside the Nakh languages of Chechnya and Ingushetia. In its narrower and more traditional sense the term covers the Avar-Andic, Dargic, Lezgic and Tsezic branches together with the Lak and Khinalug language isolates, standing to the wider Northeast Caucasian family in the same complementary relationship that Nakh does. Reconstruction of the shared protolanguage has found that Nakh is no more divergent from Dagestanian than the various Dagestanian branches are from one another, so most specialists now treat Nakh and Dagestanian as coordinate branches of one unified family rather than as two separately opposed halves, and the term Dagestanian is sometimes used broadly enough to stand for the entire Northeast Caucasian family, Nakh included.