The Dargins (or Dargwa) are an ethnic group in the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation. At the 1989 Soviet Census they numbered 280,431, or 15.8 percent of the republic. In the USSR as a whole there were 365,038 Dargins, of whom over 97 percent considered Dargin to be their native tongue. Of that same number 68 percent claimed fluency in Russian as a second language. This would include a significant majority of the adults. The Dargins are situated in the area of Kizlyar, where one of the branches of the Dagestani State University is found.
The Dargin language is a member of the Lak-Dargwa group of the Northeast Caucasian family of languages. In Soviet times it would also have been included in the larger category of Ibero-Caucasian languages. This grouping owed as much to the politics of druzhba narodov (the Soviet policy of Friendship of the Peoples) as it did to the reality of linguistic relation in this diverse collection of languages found in the Caucasus region. Following the general pattern of many of the non-Slavic languages of the Soviet Union, Dargin has had a modified Cyrillic alphabet since 1937. A Latin alphabet was utilized from 1926 to 1937 and before that Dargin was written in an Arabic script.
A modest number of books was published in Dargin during the Soviet period. From 1984 to 1985, for example, a total of fifty-one titles appeared. This compares favorably with other ethnic groups of its size, but without an ethnic jurisdiction of its own. A people such as the Abkhaz, with less than a third of the population of the Dargins, had 149 titles published in the same two-year period.
The Dargins have competed with other local nationalities for position within the diverse Dagestan Republic as ethnic politics are manipulated along with religious identity. The Dargins have traditionally been Sunni Muslims, with the strong influence of Sufism characteristic in the Caucasus region.
Bibliography
Karny, Yo'av. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
—PAUL CREGO
