Vowels

Bats has a typical triangular five-vowel system with short–long contrast (except for u, which has no long form). Bats also has a number of diphthongs, ei, ui, oi, ai, ou, and au.^[3] All vowels and diphthongs have nasalized allophones that are the result of phonetic and morphophonemic processes; this is represented by a superscript n, as in kʼnateⁿ boy-GEN.

Consonants

Bats has a relatively typical consonant inventory for a Northeast Caucasian language. Unlike its close relatives, Chechen and Ingush, Bats has retained the lateral fricative /ɬ/. Also notable is the presence of two geminate ejectives, tːʼ and qːʼ, which are cross-linguistically rare.^[4]

Writing comparison table

Noun classes

Traditional analyses posit that Bats has eight noun classes, the highest number among the Northeast Caucasian languages; however, a more recent analysis gives only five classes.^[5] This analysis (not unlike analyses of Lak) yields the grouping shown below:

Under this analysis, the additional three classes are examples of inquorate gender, where the number of items displaying this behavior are insufficient to constitute an independent grouping. Furthermore, they can be explained as inflecting one class in the singular, and another in the plural, e.g. the B/B group agrees as if it belonged to the Bd class in the singular but the male human class in the plural.

Noun cases

Batsbi makes use of nine noun cases total, though in the majority of nouns, the ergative and instrumental cases have a common form.

Numerals

Like most of its relatives, Bats' numerals are vigesimal, using 20 as a common base. This is mainly evident in the construction of higher decads, so that 40 (šauztʼqʼ) is formed from 2 × 20 and 200 (icʼatʼqʼ) formed from is 10 × 20.^[5] When modifying nominals, the numeral precedes the noun it modifies.

In Bats, as in its closest relatives Chechen and Ingush, the number four (Dʕivʔ) begins with a noun-class marker, represented by D (by default, or another capital letter for the other classes). This marker will agree in class with the class of the nominal which the number modifies, even if that nominal is not overtly expressed and is only apparent through pragmatic or discursive context, as in Vʕivʔev (four (males)). This is seen in the word four itself as well as its derivatives.

Verbs

Bats has explicit inflections for agentivity of a verb; it makes a distinction between "as woʒe" (I fell down through no fault of my own) and "so woʒe" (I fell down and it was my own fault).