Georgian · ქართული

About Georgian

Language family

Kartvelian (South Caucasian)

Where it's spoken

Georgia, in the South Caucasus

Speakers

roughly 4 million speakers

Georgian belongs to the small Kartvelian family, unrelated to the Indo-European, Turkic, or Semitic languages that surround the Caucasus region, and its nearest relatives — Svan, Mingrelian, and Laz — are themselves distinct enough to not be mutually intelligible with it. It uses its own Mkhedruli script, one of only a handful of alphabets in the world unrelated to any other, and has a written literary tradition going back roughly 1,500 years. Its grammar is known for a complex, ergative-patterned verb system that can encode subject, object, and indirect object information all within a single verb.