Abkhaz – BGN/PCGN transliteration system
Abkhaz virtual keyboard
The Abkhaz virtual keyboard allows you to enter characters with a click of your mouse. There’s no need to change your keyboard layout anymore. The transliteration of each supported character is displayed on the right side of the character. You can then directly transliterate your text from one script to the other according to the selected transliteration system.
Language overview
Abkhaz (аҧсуа бызшәа) belongs to the Abazgi group of the Northwest Caucasian languages family. Official language in the Republic of Abkhazia, located in northwestern Georgia, alongside Russian, it counts about 110,000 speakers. The Abkhaz language is written in a variation of the Cyrillic script since 1954 that counts 62 letters, including the digraphs.
Transliteration system: BGN/PCGN
The BGN/BGCN is a virtual committee formed by the United States Board on Geographic Names (BGN), which is a United States federal body, and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN), an independent inter-departmental body for the use of the British government. Both are aimed at establishing and maintaining uniform usage of geographic names, and their standards have been agreed upon by both party as a joint adoption.
Abkhaz is a consonant-rich north-western Caucasian language and has been written in a modified Cyrillic script since 1954. Given the language’s phonological complexity, Abkhaz letters have been addressed in this 2011 romanization system as per their articulation, rather than necessarily reflecting their orthography or the BGN/PCGN romanization of Russian Cyrillic. Certain characters are written followed by ь or ә, usually denoting palatalization and denoting labialization respectively, and these digraphs are also included, the palatal consonants being marked with /y/ in the romanization and labialized consonants being marked with /w/. Retroflex consonants are marked with an underline in the romanization whilst the apostrophe in the romanizations denotes the glottal form of the consonants.
Specific rule
- In order to retain reversibility, where two consonant characters appear together and the resulting romanization is equivalent to a Roman-script digraph occurring in the system (i.e. gh, zh, dz, sh or ts), a medial dot may be employed between the Roman-script consonants (e.g. g·h) in order to distinguish these from the Roman-script digraphs.
Other transliteration systems for Abkhaz
The other currently supported transliteration systems for Abkhaz are: ALA-LC, ISO 9, and TITUS.
Books
Parlons abkhaze : Une langue du Caucase
by Michel Malherbe, editors L’Harmattan (2014)
[
Amazon.com]
Abkhaz links
Other supported languages
The other supported languages are: Adyghe, Altai, Armenian (eastern, classical), Armenian (western), Azerbaijani (Azeri), Bashkir, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Carrier, Cherokee, Chuvash, Erzya, Georgian, Greek, Ingush, Inuktitut, Japanese, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Moldovan, Old Church Slavonic, Ossetian, Russian, Serbian, Tamazight, Udmurt, Ukrainian, Vai, and Yakut.