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M . A g l a r o v (Makhachkala)
A Phenomenon of Ethnolingual Manyfoldness in Daghestan
(to the research of the causes of ethnic divergent evolution
and integration)
The ethno-linguistic plurality is one of the brightest features of the Caucasus,
especially of Daghestan, and at the same time it is its age-old secret. The
previous ideas of the causes of multilingual system in Daghestan (division of
landscape, immigrations) are not improved.
The ethnic and appropriately linguistic situation in Daghestan (about 30
languages and 100 dialects) is a production of the unique multi-partial (polystructural)
political system and is equal to it, so as such small units like free
communities and even some communities which had had the structure of civil
communities before Daghestan joined Russia.
In Highland Daghestan there was founded an association of micro-political
formations with their unions – free communities which had their own territory
with overall possessive and administrative rights, that is territorial and political
sovereignty. Such a mosaic of social-political autonomous units – free
communities including political formations of feudal type which had existed on
this territory for the last one and a half – two thousand years – turned out to be
enough to found ethnic communities with there own languages, dialects and
twangs within these formations.
It would be a mistake to search for the situation of the political consolidation
for such interethnic communities as the whole regions united by the language
family or known in ethnography as historic-ethnographic areas. These levels
are out of political situations and are predestined by the common ways of ethnic
genesis. But when we approach to the more detailed ethnic map, the importance
of the factors mentioned here rises and in some cases they obtain the full priority.
The leading role of the political start in the process of ethno-lingual dissociation
or integration is not universal and the ability of the political organization
of the society to form autonomous ethno-cultural units (to an ethnographic effect)
isn’t realized in all cases but only under the certain historic conditions, in
the certain system of social relations at the certain level.
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