Georgian language

Lore & Background

Georgian is not related to any major language family outside Georgia, but is closely connected to Megrelian and more distantly to Svan within the Kartvelian family. Its history is divided into Early Old Georgian (5th–8th centuries), Classical Old Georgian (9th–11th centuries), Middle Georgian (11th/12th–17th/18th centuries), and Modern Georgian (17th/18th century–present). The earliest direct attestations are 5th-century inscriptions and palimpsests, and the oldest surviving literary work is the 5th-century Martyrdom of the Holy Queen Shushanik by Iakob Tsurtaveli. The emergence of Georgian as a written language followed the Christianization of Georgia in the mid-4th century, which replaced Aramaic as the literary language.

Reader's Guide

Georgian is significant as the only Kartvelian language with a long written tradition and official status, serving as a cultural and administrative anchor for Georgia. Its unique script, Mkhedruli, has no case distinction but uses Mtavruli for titles. The language features a rich consonant system with aspirated, voiced, and ejective stops, and a five-vowel system. Georgian is agglutinative with complex verb structures allowing up to eight morphemes and polypersonalism. It has seven noun cases, lacks grammatical gender and articles, and uses a left-branching syntax with postpositions. Its vocabulary is highly derivational, and its numeric system is vigesimal (base-20). The language's dialects are all mutually intelligible, with standard Georgian based on the Kartlian dialect. Georgian phonotactics are notable for frequent complex consonant clusters, often violating sonority sequencing.

Did You Know?

• Georgian is written with its own unique scripts of unclear origin.
• The earliest extant references to Georgian are from the 2nd-century Roman grammarian Marcus Cornelius Fronto.
• Georgian has a vigesimal numeric system based on 20, not decimal.
• The first printed books partially in Georgian were authored by Nikoloz Cholokashvili in 1629.