ABSTRACT
The Republic of Georgia, independent since 1991, incorporates the homeland of three of the four Kartvelian peoples: the Georgians proper, the Mingrelians and the Svans; the fourth people are the Laz, who live almost exclusively in modern-day Turkey. These peoples each have their own language, with only two of the Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) language family close enough to be mutually intelligible: Mingrelian and Laz. The Kartvelian language family has not been conclusively demonstrated to be related to any other language or language family spoken either today or in the past. Within Georgia, since c.1930, all Mingrelians and Svans have been classified collectively as ‘Georgians’, which means that all censuses conducted since that time have been fundamentally flawed. The ‘Georgian’ population of Georgia from the last Soviet census of 1989, namely 3,787,393 (equivalent to 70.1 per cent of Georgia’s total population), conceals up to perhaps 1 million Mingrelians and around 50,000 Svans (plus 3,000 speakers of a north central Caucasian language called Bats).
