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

In our opinion, outdated and inconsistent lingvocultural qualifications
originating from the Russian-Soviet Empire provide an impetus
for such discussion; unfortunately since post soviet period until today
due to inadequate activities of Georgian scientific or state institutes no
reasonable steps were taken to reject politicized qualifications established
by the Russian empire in Kartvelology within the international
information and scientific networks.
Cf.: Namely, in recent decades, by efforts of Russian empire, the
unfounded arguments regarding Georgia’s linguistic-ethnic situation
have become dominant in foreign scientific and political circles. Here is
one of such arguments:
According to the main ethnological encyclopedia in the World
Wide Web Georgia is populated by the following ethnoses/peoples:
Azeris – 308 000, Assyrians (Aisors) – 3 000, Abkhazs -
101 000, Batsbs - 3 420, Greeks - 38 000, Laz - 2 000, Megrels - 500
000, Ossetians - 100 000, Russians - 372 000, Svans (use Georgian
and Russian as a literary language) - 15 000, Armenians - 448 000,
Urums (Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christian Greek population) -
97 746, Georgians - 3 901 380, Georgian Jews - 20 000, Kurds - 40
000, etc. (Ethnologue report for Georgia http://www.ethnologue.com) 403 .
As above-mentioned, a group of Russian politicians and
scientists actively offers arguments according to which Megrelian
and Svan must be assigned a status of "regional languages". It is
noteworthy that attempts are made to renew attempts to create
primers for the Georgia’s regional idioms, to translate the Bible or
create original literary works into these dialects 404
; this has been
402
The figures in this list are inaccurate; for critical analysis of similar politicized materials
see: T. Putkaradze, Native Language and Dialects of Georgians Kutaisi, 2008.
403
The figures in this list are inaccurate; for critical analysis of similar politicized materials
see: T. Putkaradze, Native Language and Dialects of Georgians Kutaisi, 2008.
404
Translation of the Bible into the Svan and the Megrelian languages is being implemented
by the Institute for Bible Translation; the branch of the very institute is represented
by the Baptist Bishop Malkhaz Songulashvili and Professor Zurab Kiknadze;
translation of the Bible into the Svan-Megrelian languages is approved by Sozar Subar.
Criticism against his “arguments” is presented in discussions by G. Andriadze and Z.
Tskhovrebadze (about the issue see: Materials by Nino Mikiashvili, newspaper “Resonance”
(№ 201, 208), August 1 and 8, 2005. declaring Zan-Svan as independent lan-
326