About

Languages of the Caucasus is a double-blind peer-reviewed open-access electronic journal that seeks to publish high-quality linguistic research on languages of the Caucasus and thereby to increase the availability, visibility, and international impact of this work. Our purview is linguistic work of any subdiscipline, theoretical framework, etc. informed by contemporary international linguistics and dealing with languages of the Caucasus.

The field of Caucasian linguistic studies has never had a journal that could make publication and reading of current work easily available to scholars in the various countries where research on the Caucasus is done. The Internet and open-source publication now make that possible, and Languages of the Caucasus seeks to fill the gap with rapid publication and a wide subdisciplinary focus comprising all subfields of linguistics. There has also never been a good publication venue, with high standards of peer review, of field reports on phenomena of interest from the Caucasus, and we seek to fill that gap as well.

Another important goal is to strengthen communication and the sense of community among scholars working on the Caucasus, importantly including those from the Caucasus and native speakers of languages of the Caucasus. Not all of this audience knows English; French and German have traditionally been the main international languages for scholars from the Caucasus; and much of our readership and potential authorship knows Russian. Therefore our policy is to strongly encourage publication in English but also allow French, German, and Russian.

Standards and practices of peer review have varied in the countries where work on the Caucasus has been published, and another of our goals is to unify those standards and bring them into line with international scientific publishing practices. Articles are submitted for review anonymously (i.e. the article does not identify the author) and read and evaluated by usually three experts in the article's field or subfield, whose identity is not made known to the author. The editorial board votes on the article, and the editor returns a decision (accept / accept with minor revisions / revise and resubmit / reject) to the author together with the referees' comments. We follow standard procedures on conflict of interest: No one can referee a paper by their supervisor or supervisee, a relative, anyone from their same institution, or anyone in whose career they have an interest.

Grounds for acceptance or non-acceptance include accuracy, originality of the research question, appropriateness of method to the research question, novelty and/or interest of the research question and findings, and potential impact on Caucasian and/or general linguistics.

Each issue of Languages of the Caucasus is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.  The International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for Languages of the Caucasus is 2375-2068.