South Caucasian languages: Encyclopedia II - South Caucasian languages - Classification

South Caucasian languages - Classification

• Georgian languages
  • Georgian (kartuli in Georgian, gruzinski in Russian(?)), with 4.1 million native speakers. Of these, there are 3.9 million in Georgia, and about 50,000 each in Turkey and Iran.
  • Gruzinic (also called Judæo-Georgian; kivruli in Georgian and Gruzinic, gruzinit in Russian(?)), with about 80,000 speakers, of whom 60,000 are in Israel, and 20,000 in Georgia. May be considered a dialect of Georgian.
• Zan languages
  • Megrelian or Mingrelian (margaluri in Megrelian, megruli in Georgian), with some 500 000 native speakers as of 1989, mainly in the Samegrelo region of Western Georgia and (at the time) in the Gali district of eastern Abkhazia. Many Mingrelian refugees from Abkhazia now live in Tblisi.
  • Laz (lazuri in Laz and Georgian, also chanuri in Georgian), with 33,000 native speakers as of 1980, mostly in the Black Sea littoral area of Northeast Turkey, where they constitute a third of the ethnic Georgian population, and with some 2000 in the Ajaria district of Georgia.
• Svan language (lushnu in Svan, svanuri in Georgian), with approximately 15,000 native speakers in the north-western mountainous region of Georgia.

With the exception of Georgian and Gruzinic, these languages are not mutually intelligible. However, they are clearly related, and Laz and Megrelian are officially considered a single language, called "Zan". The connection between all these languages was first reported in linguistic literature by J. Güldenstädt in the 18th century, and later proven by G. Rosen, M. Brosset, F. Bopp and others during the 1840's. They are believed to have split off from a single proto-Kartvelian language, possibly spoken in the region of present-day Georgia and Northern Turkey in the 3rd-2nd millenniums BC.

Based on the degree of change, some linguists (including A. Chikobava, G. Klimov, T. Gamkrelidze, and G. Machavariani) conjecture that the earliest split, which separated Svan from the other languages, occurred in the second millennium BC or earlier; while Megrelian and Laz were separated from Georgian roughly a thousand years later, and split from each other roughly 500 years ago.

Gruzinic is sometimes regarded as a variant of Georgian, modified by the inclusion of large numbers of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords. Its divergence from Georgian is comparatively recent.

South Caucasian languages - Higher-level connections

No relationship with other languages, not even with the North Caucasian families, has been demonstrated so far. Some linguists have proposed that the Kartvelian family is part of the much larger Nostratic language family, but this is speculative at present.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Classification", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki