Dictionary:

Avar

  (ä'vär)

1. A member of a Caucasian or eastern European people whose empire, centered in southern Hungary and extending widely between the Elbe and Dneiper Rivers, reached its peak in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.
2. 1. A member of a traditionally Muslim people of southern Dagestan and neighboring areas of Azerbaijan.
   2. The Caucasian language of this people.

For more information on Avar, visit Britannica.com.

The Avars are one of the many people of the Dagestan Republic of the Russian Federation. Numbering 496,077 within Dagestan at the 1989 Soviet census, they formed 28 percent of this republic's population. This made them the largest ethnic group in Dagestan (the Dargins were second, with 15.8 percent), but still far from a majority. There were a total of 600,989 Avars in the Soviet Union in 1989. Of this total, 97 percent spoke Avar as their first language. Nearly 61 percent, a significant number of the adults, claimed fluency in Russian as a second language.

The Avar language is a member of the Avaro-Andi-Dido group of the Northeast Caucasian family of languages. In Soviet times this would have made the them a part of the larger Ibero-Caucasian family, a classification now seen as a remnant of Soviet druzhba narodov politics. It is written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet that was introduced in 1937. A Latin alphabet had been used previously, from 1928 to 1937. Before that an Arabic script was used. A modest number of books have been published in Avar. From 1984 to 1985, fifty-eight titles were published. Being without their own eponymous ethnic jurisdiction, the Avars were less privileged in this category than the Abkhaz, for example, whose jurisdiction was the Abkhazian Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). With only one-sixth of the population of the Avars, the Abkhazians nonetheless published some 149 books in their language in the same period.

The most prominent leader of Caucasian resistance against the encroachment of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century was an Avar man named Shamil. Curiously, his power base was centered not among his own people, but among the Chechens immediately to the west.

In the delicate multiethnic balance of Dagestani politics, the Avars have occupied a preeminent, if not a dominant, status, especially in the post-Soviet period. The Avar language is often spoken by members of other ethnic groups within the Dagestan Republic as a means of gaining access to power structures. One of the disputes in Dagestan involves the Chechens. Part of the Chechen Republic's territory that had been absorbed by Dagestan after the Chechen deportation in 1944 was never returned. Avars occupied some of this territory, and the return of Chechens seeking their land has resulted in ongoing conflict.

The ethnogenesis of the Avars is often linked to the people of the same name who appeared with the Hunnic invasions of late antiquity. These Avars original from East Central Asia with other Turkic-speaking peoples, and so the connection with a people speaking a vastly different language is difficult to make.

Bibliography

Ethnologue <www.ethnologue.com

Hill, Fiona. (1995). Russia's Tinderbox: Conflict in the North Caucasus and its Implication for the Future of the Russian Federation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Karny, Yoav. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

—PAUL CREGO

Avars may refer to:

• Eurasian Avars, a nomadic people who invaded Europe in the 6th Century CE
• Uar
• Caucasian Avars, a modern people of the Caucasus
• Avar language
• Avar (animation variable), used in computer animation, or computer generated imagery

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