"evropuli qartia saqarTvelo "European Charter for Regional or ...

are branches of the Georgian language, rather that separate languages,
the very idea has been and is still claimed by the enemies of our country".
However, not during the Tsarism period but in the soviet empire
the Theory of Kartvelian "languages" indeed became widespread. A
large part of the Georgian scientists had to take into consideration the
"only" acceptable view claimed by Stalin. In the repressive regime the
resistance or proving a differing opinion equaled the suicide. At last under
the influence of the Soviet tradition, some considered the Georgians
of Lazeti-Samegrelo and Svaneti – one of the most principal creators of
the centuries-old Georgian literary culture – to be the tribes without
their own written language and literary culture who write in the language
of their related people (the Georgians). Thought such unjustifiable
conclusion had previously been fiercely debated; discussions by Iv.
Javakhishvili, N. Marr, A. Shanidze and S. Khundadze are of special
interest (see History of the Georgian language, 2006, pp. 37-39).
All academic attempts of reconstructing proto-Kartvelian and the
history of Georgian literary language proves that the phonematic, nominal,
verbal, syntactic and lexical-semantic structures are in general
identical with the common Kartvelian language (for the materials see,
2.2); as for the domestic dialects of the Georgians, they are more or less
varied variants of this theoretically restored common language. Accordingly,
it s logical to consider the current varieties originating from the
proto-language as dialects in terms of correlation between them and the
common national historical language 286
.
Modern Kartvelian dialects could be grouped in different ways;
for instance, three major groups are identified under the centerperiphery
principle, while two groups are identified under the historical
reflexes of consonants:
I. the center-periphery principle, in the first place, considers
similarity-difference between the phonematic, morphological, syntactic
286 Cf.: Dialect is a Greek word that means a branch of a nationwide language, a local
speech which is spoken by a part of a given nation (ethnicity).
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