ABSTRACT
The now independent Republic of Georgia 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. Each of these peoples have their own language, and the only two of the Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) family which are close enough to be mutually intelligible are Mingrelian and Laz; the 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 all Mingrelians and Svans since c. 1930 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 one million Mingrelians and around 50,000 Svans (plus 3,000 speakers of a North Central Caucasian language called Bats). Georgian is the only Kartvelian language to be written and taught - all Svans and most Mingrelians are schooled in Georgian and use it (or Russian) as their literary language.
