What does it sound like? Related languages? Where did the modern day Georgians come from and why is their language considered something of an anomaly in Europe. Is it pre-Indo-European?
Georgians speak Georgian. More info:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=GEO
Many Georgians (in Georgia, anyway) are also bilingual in Russian, and there is a very characteristic Georgian accent in Russian. They have their own script, and I’m not sure which (if any) of the related languages use Georgian script. It’s one of the few non-Slavic languages that was not forced to adopt the Cyrillic script under Stalin, but then since he was Georgian, one might have expected that.
Oh, and whatever Georgians I’ve met will tell you they have basically been in the Caucasus since the dawn of time. Some also believe they are distantly related to other indigenous European peoples, such as the Basques. For a while, some linguists even considered Georgian part of the “Ibero-Caucasian” language group, but I believe that theory has since been debunked.
One thing though; Georgia suffered partiularly under Stalin’s rule, he certainly did few favours to his birth ‘country’ (when he was born obviously it was a part of the Russian Empire and during his reign it was a SSR). Although his cult of personality was particularly persisent in that region.
Georgian is extremely agglutinative (like most Central Asian languages), and has some excellent consonant clusters. I think it’s quite a beautiful language.
This is a very thorough introduction to the language, if you wish to know more details.
If you want to hear some really beautiful a cappella singing and get some Georgian-language immersion at the same time, check this out:
…or anything else by the Rustavi Choir. I’ve probably driven my neighbors bonkers by playing it over and over again.
Also the Anchiskhati Choir, who are less known but (imho) a bit better.
I’ve heard some of this stuff before, and it is very nice!
AFAIK, the Caucasian Language Family is more of a geographic grouping than a linguistic one. Georgian is an oddball language.
John Mace writes:
> AFAIK, the Caucasian Language Family is more of a geographic grouping than a
> linguistic one. Georgian is an oddball language.
The Caucasus is a linguistic mess. There are two families spoken nowhere else - North Caucasus and South Caucusus (but some scholars break North Caucasus up into two families, which would make it three families spoken only there), and there are also Indo-European and Altaic languages. (Again, some scholars don’t accept Altaic as a single family and break it up into three families.) Click on the appropriate family names in this website: