Ergative–absolutive language in the context of "Nominative case"

Ubykh is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, an ethnic group of Circassian nation who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to the Ottoman Empire during the Circassian genocide.

The Ubykh language is ergative and polysynthetic, with a high degree of agglutination, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants but only two phonemically distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants, it has one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, and the largest number for any language without clicks.

In grammar, the ergative case (abbreviated erg) is the grammatical case that identifies a nominal phrase as the agent of a transitive verb in ergative–absolutive languages.

Archi /ɑːˈtʃiː/ is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the Archis in the village of Archib, southern Dagestan, Russia, and the six surrounding smaller villages.

It is unusual for its many phonemes and for its contrast between several voiceless velar lateral fricatives, /𝼄, 𝼄ʷ, 𝼄ː, 𝼄ʷː/, voiceless and ejective velar lateral affricates, /k͡𝼄, k͡𝼄ʷ, k͡𝼄ʼ, k͡𝼄ʷʼ/, and a voiced velar lateral fricative, /ʟ̝/. It is an ergative–absolutive language with four noun classes and has a morphological system with irregularities on all levels. Mathematically, there are 1,502,839 possible forms that can be derived from a single verb root.

Päri, is a Luo language of South Sudan. Päri has been claimed to have ergative alignment, which is rare-to-nonexistent in African languages, although recent descriptions of the language have instead described the case system as marked nominative (nominative–absolutive).

In grammar, the absolutive case (abbreviated ABS) is the case of nouns in ergative–absolutive languages that would generally be the subjects of intransitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs in the translational equivalents of nominative–accusative languages such as English.

In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergative constructions are used vary among different languages.