Ubykh: the language with 84 consonants

Updated October 5, 2026 · 4 min read

A language famous for its consonants

Ubykh is known to linguists above all for its sounds. It had 84 distinct consonants, four of which appear only in loanwords, and among them 20 uvular consonants and 29 pure fricatives: more of each, Wikipedia notes, than any other known language. Its vowels are counted differently by different scholars: two in the classic description, three in a later analysis.

The 1996 edition of the Guinness Book of Records listed Ubykh as the language with the most consonant phonemes. Since 2017 the record has gone to !Xóõ, a language of southern Africa with 130 consonants and clicks among them, so Ubykh is now described as having the largest consonant inventory of any language without clicks.

Where Ubykh was spoken

The Ubykh lived on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, around present-day Sochi. In the 1860s, at the end of the Caucasian War, most of them moved to the Ottoman Empire. In Turkey they founded villages such as Hacıosman and Hacıyakup near Manyas (Balıkesir), Maşukiye in Kocaeli and Kırkpınar near Sapanca.

There, the Ubykh lived among other Circassians. Turkish Wikipedia notes that all Ubykhs spoke Adyghe, and some spoke Ubykh as well. Over the generations Ubykh fell out of everyday use, and the descendants of the Ubykh in Turkey speak Turkish and Circassian today.

Tevfik Esenç, the last speaker

Tevfik Esenç (1904–1992) grew up in Hacıosman, where he was raised for a time by grandparents who spoke Ubykh. He served as the village’s muhtar and later took a post in the civil service in Istanbul. He spoke Ubykh, Adyghe and Turkish.

In Istanbul he worked for years with the French linguist Georges Dumézil and his colleague Georges Charachidzé. He had an excellent memory, and he became the main source not only for the language but for Ubykh mythology, history and customs. Dumézil considered his Ubykh the closest thing to a standard form of the language. Esenç died on 7 October 1992 and was buried in Hacıosman; with him, Ubykh ceased to be spoken.

How Ubykh was recorded

Ubykh was never written by its own speakers. What we know comes from linguists who worked with its last speakers before it was too late. In 1930 the Hungarian linguist Julius von Mészáros took notes on Ubykh in Turkey that laid the foundation of its study. Georges Dumézil came the same year to record the language, published a collection of Ubykh tales in 1957 and a full account of its verb in Le Verbe Oubykh (1975). The Norwegian Hans Vogt published a large dictionary in 1963. Georges Charachidzé, George Hewitt and A. Sumru Özsoy also worked with the last speakers.

Dumézil devised a way to write the language down, and Tevfik Esenç eventually learned to write Ubykh in it. Thousands of pages of material and many audio recordings were collected, and a large part of the oral literature was written down, including some cycles of the Nart saga.

Ubykh and the Circassian language

The Northwest Caucasian family has three branches: Circassian (Adyghe and Kabardian), Abkhaz–Abaza, and Ubykh on its own. Ubykh shares features with both of its neighbours, and most of its borrowed words came from Adyghe or Arabic.

Listen to Ubykh

Recordings of Tevfik Esenç speaking Ubykh, with transcriptions, are kept in the Pangloss collection of the CNRS in Paris. The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive also has Ubykh recordings.

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Ubykh: questions