South Caucasian languages

South Caucasian languages include:

• Georgian language (Kartuli ena) - official language of Georgia, more than 4 million native speakers
• Mingrelian[?] or Laz language - appr. 300,000 native speakers
• Svan language[?] - appr. 35,000 native speakers in the northern mountainous region of Georgia

There is some ongoing work on the possible genetic relationship between speakers of South Caucasian languages and the Basque language, and some recent theories propose a phyletic link between Proto-South Caucasian and Proto-Indo-European. The Proto-Indo-European connection is quite promising, but most evidence for uniting the South Caucasian languages with Basque is based on surface morphology. While the South Caucasian languages share SOV word order with Basque, as well as an ergative case, the application of the ergative is somewhat different between the two families.

External Links

• http://people.cornell.edu/pages/bcp6/basque.doc (http://people.cornell.edu/pages/bcp6/basque.doc)