In this article the author explores a copy dated 1828 of a seventeenth-century manuscript codex of customary law from the Kaytag-Darghi area, translated and published in 1964 by Professor Rasul Magomedov in Makhachkala. H. van den Berg utilises this rare document for a tentative reconstruction of an earlier stage of Darghi language, in prelude to a future critical edition of the text as soon as its original manuscript is discovered. The main linguistic results of her analysis are in the field of phonology, even though a few linguistic generalisations can be made given the limited dimension of the available corpus of texts.