Avar is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by over 780,000 people in Dagestan and Azerbaijan. It has a Cyrillic alphabet and is an ergative language. Avar belongs to the Avar-Andi-Tsez subgroup of the Alarodian language family and is the lingua franca for other languages in the region. There are two main dialects of Avar - northern and southern - and it has a total of fifteen spoken dialects named after local tribes.