families – for example on adverbs, postpositions, particles, and even case-marked nouns and pronouns. In the example from Archi below, doːʕzub ‘big’ and abu ‘made’, but also the adverb ditːabu ‘quickly’ and the personal pronouns nenabu ‘we’ and belabu ‘to us’, all agree in number and gender with the argument in the absolutive case, χʕon ‘cow’. nena<b>u doːʕzu-b χʕon b-ela<b>u ditːa<b>u χir a<b>u 1PL.INCL.ERG<III.SG> be.big.ATTR-III.SG cow(III)[SG.ABS] III.SG-1PL.INCL.DAT<III.SG> quickly<III.SG> behind <III.SG>make.PFV ‘We quickly drove the big cow to us (home).’ This kind of clausal agreement has been labelled ‘external agreement’. The same term is also used for the (cross-linguistically even rarer) phenomenon where a converb agrees with an argument which lies outside the converb's own clause. This is seen in the following example from Northern Akhvakh, where mīʟō ‘not having gone’ has a masculine adverbial suffix (-ō), agreeing with hugu ek’wa ‘the man’. [ĩk’a ri-da-la m-īʟ-ō] hu-gu ek’wa-la w-uʟ’-u-wudi. long time-INT-ADD N-go.NEG-M[ADV] DIST-LL man-ADD M-die-M-PF3 ‘Shortly after that (lit. ‘long time not having gone’), the man died.’ Language classification A long-time classification divided the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, whence the term Nakho-Dagestanian. However, attempts at reconstructing the protolanguage suggest that the Nakh languages are no more divergent from Dagestanian than the various branches of Dagestanian are from each other, although this is still not universally accepted. The following outline, based on the work of linguist Bernard Comrie and others, has been adopted by Ethnologue. An Avar–Andi–Dido branch was abandoned, but has been resurrected as the "New Type" languages in Schulze (2009, 2013) and Lak–Dargwa has likewise returned. One factor complicating internal classification within the family is that the diachronic development of its respective branches is marked both by an extreme degree of diffusion and divergence followed by secondary convergence, which complicates the comparative method. Population data is from Ethnologue 16th ed. Avar–Andic family Spoken in the Northwest Dagestan highlands and western Dagestan. Avar is the lingua franca for these and the Tsezic languages and is the only literary language. Schulze (2009) gives the following family tree for the Avar–Andic languages: Avar (761,960) Andic languages Andi (Qwannab) (5,800) Akhvakh–Tindi Akhvakh (210 as of 2010) Karata–Tindi Karata (Kirdi) (260 as of 2010) Botlikh–Tindi Botlikh (210 as of 2010) Godoberi (130 as of 2010) Chamalal (500 as of 2010) Bagvalal–Tindi Bagvalal (1,450) Tindi (2,150) Figures retrieved from Ethnologue. These languages are spoken in the following rayons of Dagestan: Axvax, Botlikh, Buynaksk (Shura),