Georgian language

Georgian language

Caucasian language of the Republic of Georgia, spoken by about 4.1 million people worldwide. Georgian is unique among Caucasian languages in having an ancient literary tradition. The earliest attestation of the language is an inscription of AD 430 in a church in Palestine, in a script ancestral to that used for Old Georgian (5th–11th centuries). The civil script used to write Modern Georgian, with 33 characters and no distinction between upper- and lowercase, was an offshoot of a script that first appeared in the 10th century. The origins of Georgian writing are uncertain, though it was presumably a free adaptation of the Greek alphabet, with new characters invented for the sounds peculiar to Georgian. Georgian has features typical of other Caucasian languages, including a large consonant inventory (with clusters of up to six consonants appearing at the beginning of a word).