Khwarshi Erotic

The Khwarshi are one of a cluster of very small nations wedged into the western corner of Dagestan, in the Tsumadinsky district, where the gorges draining into the Andi Koysu are steep enough that villages a few hours apart speak languages they cannot use with one another. The first thing worth knowing is that Khwarshi is not a dialect of Avar. It belongs to the Tsezic branch of Northeast Caucasian, next to Tsez, Hinukh, Bezhta and Hunzib, and it carries what those languages are known for: a crowded consonant inventory of ejectives and pharyngeals, a noun class system, and cases that specify not only where a thing is but whether it is on, in, under or behind. Nobody writes it. Children speak Khwarshi at home, take their lessons in Avar, and use Russian past the republic line. Because the census has long offered Avar as the box to tick, the official count of self-declared Khwarshi barely reaches the hundreds, while the language itself holds some thousands of speakers, in Khwarshi village and in the Inkhokvari settlements, whose speech differs enough that specialists argue over whether to call it a separate language.

Islam came up these valleys from the lowlands over centuries and settled in hard: Sunni, Shafi'i in law, with the Naqshbandi Sufi lineages that shaped religious life across Dagestan. It runs alongside adat, the customary law of the village community, which handles pasture, water and grievance, and alongside the patrilineal kin group that tells a person who owes them help. The Khwarshi lived through the nineteenth century inside Shamil's Imamate and the long war that ended it, then collectivization, then the resettlements: in 1944, when the Chechens were deported, highland Dagestani communities were moved down into the emptied villages, and after 1957 they were moved back up, two uprootings in thirteen years. Families kept going down anyway, to Khasavyurt and Kizilyurt, where the land is flat and the work is. The high villages are still there, stone houses stacked so that one family's flat roof is the yard of the family above, terraces cut into grades that look impossible until you see them worked, sheep taken to winter pasture and brought back in spring, passes shut by snow for months. The first full grammar of the language appeared in 2009, written by a linguist from the community itself, which is a fair summary of where the Khwarshi stand: a people the paperwork keeps filing under someone else's name, putting their own on the record.