Georgian

Introduction

Georgian Map Georgian, also known as Kartvelian or Kartuli, is the official language of the Republic of Georgia. It belongs to the Southern branch of the Caucasian language family along with Svan, Laz, and Mingrelian. It is believed that Svan separated from the other languages in the second millennium BC. A thousand years later, Georgian separated from Laz and Mingrelian. The four are now considered to be separate languages.

Georgia Flag Georgian has a very rich and ancient literary tradition. The oldest surviving literary text in Georgian is the Martyrdom of Saint Shushaniki, the Queen by Iakob Tsurtaveli dating back to the 5th century AD. This tradition has continued uninterrupted until today. Georgian is also the liturgical language for all members of the Georgian Orthodox church.

The Georgian literary language went through three periods in its development: the Old Georgian period (5th-12th centuries), was characterized by religious content; the Medieval Georgian period (12th - 18th century) produced a number of epics; the Modern Georgian period that started in the 18th century was the beginning of the Georgian renaissance.

Georgian is spoken by 4.1 million people mainly in the Republic of Georgia where it is the official language (Ethnologue). Another 2.5 million Georgian speakers live in Turkey, Russia, US, Europe, Iran and Azerbaijan. Georgian is the literary language for speakers of Svan, Laz, and Mingrelian.

In Georgia, most newspapers and journals are published in Georgian. Radio Tbilisi broadcasts in Georgian and five other languages while Tbilisi Television broadcasts in Georgian and Russian.

Structure

Sound System

Georgian has five vowels and a consonant inventory of twenty-nine phonemes, including ejectives. Ejectives are sounds made with the air pushed out by the vocal cords instead of the lungs so that the sounds appear to be spat out. Georgian is famous for truly formidable consonant clusters with up to six consonants in the beginning of words. Consider such extragant clusters as tkven "you", zghva "sea", mtsrtneli "trainer".

Click here to learn more about the Georgian sound system.
Click here to listen to the pronunciation of some common words and phrases in Georgian.
Click here to listen to a sample text in Georgian.

Grammar

Georgian is a highly inflected language.

Noun phrase
Georgian nouns have eight cases (nominative, ergative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial, ablative, and vocative) and two numbers (singular and plural). There is no grammatical gender. Pronouns are marked for case and number, and have a possessive form. There are no articles. Georgian uses postpositions rather than prepositions.

Verb phrase
The verb system is quite complex. Some of the distinguishing characteristics of Georgian verbs are the following:

they tend to be long due to agglutination;
they belong to several different classes depending on their function;
they can include references to the subject and the direct and indirect objects, e.g., I gave it to him is one word in Georgian, a phenomenon known as polypersonalism;
there is a distinction between stative and motion verbs; the later are precisely defined through the use of directional prefixes (somewhat similar to Slavic languages).

Word order
Word order varies depending on contextual factors.

Click here to learn more about Georgian grammar.

Vocabulary

Georgian has a rich vocabulary capable of accommodating a wide variety of functions from poetry to science. Throughout history, it has borrowed words from languages with which it came into contact. There are loanwords from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, e.g., khalkhi "people" from Arabic khalq, Turkish halk. Georgian has also borrowed from European languages, especially Russian, e.g., gazeti "newspaper" from Russian gazeta "newspaper".

Writing

Georgian Scroll

A unique Georgian alphabet was devised following the country's conversion to Christianity in 337 AD. From the 5th to the 11th centuries, an alphabet named Khutsuri (ecclesiastical) was used. Since then, an alphabet called Mkhedruli (military) has been in use. No other language uses the Georgian script.

Click here to see the Georgian alphabet.
Click here to learn more about the history of the Georgian alphabet.

Resources

Georgian Language Study Resources
Yamada Language Guides
UCLA Language Materials Projec t- Georgian Profile
Malmö University Georgian Language and Culture On-line
About Georgia
Georgian Textbooks
The Georgian language -- An outline grammatical summary

Interesting Facts

Georgian Painting

Shota Rustaveli
Shota Rustaveli, a Georgian poet of the 12th century, is one of the great representatives of medieval literature. He wrote "The Knight in the Panther's Skin", Georgia's national epic, that was translated into many languages.

Click here to read an English translation of "The Knight in the Panther's Skin".

Did you know that Stalin was Georgian?
Did you know that Joseph Stalin was a native speaker of Georgian? He learned Russian as a second language and spoke it with a noticeable accent throughout his entire life. He was born Ioseb Dzhugashvili

in the town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1879.