Kaitags

Kaitags (Kaitag: хайдакьан, , , ) are an ethnic group of the Dargins, but sometimes considered as a separate people. Their number are estimated to be over 25,000. They live mainly on the territory of the Kaytagsky district of Dagestan, partly on the plain and in cities (Makhachkala, Derbent, Izberbash, etc.). Part of the Kaitag people were resettled in Chechnya in 1944, from where they later moved to the north of Dagestan. They speak the Kaitag language of the Dargin branch of the Northeast Caucasian family, but the Dargin literary language and Russian are also common. They are mostly Sunni Muslims. thumb|Traditional Kaitag textiles|Kaitag embroidery

== Ethnogenesis == The Kaitag people themselves did not preserve ancient legends about the origin of themselves. In pre-revolutionary and Soviet literature, there were theories about the Mongolian and Oghuz roots of the Kaitag people, held in particular by orientalist Vasily Bartold. In Soviet times, the Mongolic theory appeared in some works of linguists: For example, Nikolai Dmitriev believed that the modern Kaitag people had lost their Mongolic language save for very few vocabulary elements. Meanwhile orientalist Vladimir Minorsky referred to this theory as "pure delusion". According to him, the name Kaitag is attested with various spelling errors by Arabic authors as early as the 9–10th centuries.