Dargwa is a language (or a cluster of closely related languages) belonging to the Nakh-Daghestanian language group. Most of its speakers live in the Republic of Daghestan in the North Caucasus (Russian Federation). Icari is the variety of Dargwa spoken by the people of the village of Icari and by its former inhabitants who have moved to other places within Daghestan.
Many structural properties of Icari are typical of the Nakh-Daghestanian group: a rich consonant system, several series of locative cases, class agreement, morphological ergativity, a complex verb system with a whole range of tense/aspect/mood paradigms and numerous nonfinite derivations (participles, converbs and verbal nouns). Unlike most languages of the group, Dargwa has personal agreement of the verb, which in Icari follows the hierarchy 2 > 1 > 3.
This work places particular emphasis on the structure of the verb and the tense/aspect/mood system of Icari. It also includes data on the semantics of different nominal and verbal forms. This sketch of the language's grammar is accompanied by a glossed text, a list of verbal roots, a list of basic nominal lexemes and an index of grammatical morphemes.