Kumyks - Orientation

Identification and Location. The Kumyks live in flatlands and foothills, in all the cities of the Daghestan Republic, and in part of Chechen-Ingushia and North Ossetia. Their own territory runs from the Terek River in the north to the Bashlychai and the Ulluchai in the south—an area known as the Kumyk plain. The foothills consists of ridges with an average elevation of 500 to 700 meters. To the east Kumykia is bounded by the Caspian Sea into which flow the Terek, Sulak, Gamri-ozen and other rivers; some of the rivers do not reach the sea. There are few lakes in the Kumyk plain. The climate is moderate to warm (continental) with dry and hot summers, rainy autumns, and cool winters with little snow; the average year-round temperature is 11° C. In the Terek-Sulak lowlands the annual precipitation only reaches 20 to 30 centimeters, but in the foothills it is somewhat greater.

Demography. The overall Kumyk population is 282,200 (1989), of which 231,800 live in Daghestan; population growth during the last decade has been 23.5 percent. Until the 1950s and 1960s the Kumyks formed a fairly homogeneous community, but now, with the massive resettlement of mountaineers onto the Kumyk plain, the territorial unity of the Kumyks has been disrupted and the population density on the plain has sharply increased. In terms of physical anthropology, the Kumyks belong to the Caucasian type with an admixture of the Caspian type.

Linguistic Affiliation. The Kumyk language belongs to the Kipchak Subgroup of the Turkic Branch of the Altaic Family, while manifesting, however, elements of the languages of the Bulgars and Khazars (ninth and tenth centuries) and the Oghuz Turks (eleventh and twelfth centuries). Roughly from the seventeenth until the beginning of the twentieth century, Kumyk served as a language of interethnic communication in the northeastern Caucasus. The language today consists of five dialects, with the Khasavyurt and Buinaksk dialects serving as the basis of the literary language.