Budukh or Budugh is a Samur language

Samur languages

The Samur languages are the principal component of the Lezgic branch of the Northeast Caucasian languages. Lezgian and Tabasaran are literary languages.-Internal branching:* Eastern Samur** Udi – 5700 speakers...

 of the Northeast Caucasian language family

Northeast Caucasian languages

The Northeast Caucasian languages constitute a language family spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, northern Azerbaijan, and in northeastern Georgia, as well as in diaspora populations in Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East...

 spoken in parts of the Quba Rayon of Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...

. It was reportedly spoken by approximately 1,000 Budukhs in 1990, but Authier (2010) reports at most 200 speakers.

Budukh is a severely endangered language

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

, and classified as such by UNESCO

UNESCO

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...

's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Gender and agreement

Authier (2010) reports that Budugh has six 'gender-number' classes:

• human masculine,
• human adult feminine,
• animate (which includes animals, plants, and non-adult human females, as well as some abstract nouns),
• inanimate,
• non-human plural,
• human plural.

Verbs normally agree with their absolutive

Absolutive case

The absolutive case is the unmarked grammatical case of a core argument of a verb which is used as the citation form of a noun.-In ergative languages:...

 argument (intransitive subject or transitive object) in gender. In the following examples, the verb 'beat' shows animate agreement with 'donkey' and non-human plural agreement with 'donkeys'.

Ma'lla'-cır	lem	ğùvotu-ri
Mullah-erg	donkey	animate:beat:present
'Mullah beat the donkey'

Ma'lla'-cır	lemér	ğùtu-ri
Mullah-erg	donkey	nonhumanplural:beat:present
'Mullah beat the donkeys'

Compare these examples with the following, where the verb agrees with the intransitive subject:

Ma'lla'	vìxhici
Mullah	masculine:go:narrative_tense
'Mullah went.'

Lem	vüxhücü
donkey	animate:go:narrative_tense
'The donkey went.'

Verb agreement

Budukh verbs typically agree with a single argument, the absolutive. In the agreement paradigms, the majority of verbs show no overt agreement for the masculine, neuter, and non-human plural. Consider the following paradigm for the verb 'keep' in the perfective (Authier 2009):

M/N/NPL |ˤa-q-a

F |ˤa-ra-q-a

A |ˤa-va-q-a

HPL |ˤa-ba-q-a

In this paradigm, /ˤa/ is a preverb which must appear with the verb root /q/ 'keep', and the agreement morphology appears between the preverb and the root. Due to historical changes, the relationships between the various members of an agreement paradigm are often more complex and show changes of vowel and/or consonant. The following perfective paradigm for 'go' shows this (with the reconstructed form shown after the *)

M	vi-xhi
F	v-r-xhi
A	vüxhü < *vi-v-xhi
N/NPL	vidki < *vi-d-xhi
HPL	vibki < *vi-b-xhi

Word order

Budukh is an SOV language, as is seen in the following example:

Ma'lla'-cır	lemér	ğùtu-ri
Mullah-erg	donkey	nonhumanplural:beat:present
'Mullah beat the donkeys'

It has possessors before possessed nouns:

Mallá-co	rij
Mullah-adlocative	daughter
'the mullah's daughter'

Adjectives appear before the nouns that they modify:

q'usú	Mallá'
old	mullah
'the old mullah'