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

Naturally, the term "unwritten Georgian languages", established
in the scientific literature of the Soviet period, created psychological
problems for some experts.
First of all, it is noteworthy that the term Unwritten Language is
not indicated in the Charter, in fact it is not interested in this issue. The
criteria of the Charter consider that the principal language must be the
historical idiom of autochthonous ethnic minority; relation to the territory
is also substantial. Namely, as it was discussed above, the Charter
aims to protect a native language of historical population that has become
a minority. Based on an area of language spread, the Charter discusses
three types of languages of historical minorities: a language spoken
by the majority of the citizens of the region, a minority language of
both the state and the region, and a non-territorial language.
Which of these three variants of a "minority language" could apply
to Svan? None of them as it is a domestic idiom of Georgia’s (one
of the Georgian regions) principal population rather than a national
(ethnic) minority language 411
. Cf.: those who, by some reason, do not
regard Svans as Georgians consider their idiom as a "regional language",
as the majority of Lentekhi and Mestia regions speak Svan.
We think that declaring Zan-Svan as "unwritten languages"
412
represents a modified view of Stalin . We would like to emphasize the
fact that such inadequate qualification (considering the Georgian nation–the
author of the centuries-old literary culture–as ethnoses who
lack literary culture insult the population of the long-suffering regions
411 Cf.: from N. Marr until today a part of the scientists has believed that “according to
sociolinguistic definition, the Zan and the Svan are dialects of the Georgian language,
though in purely linguistic terms, they are independent languages”; in others’ opinion,
both the Megrelian-Laz and the Svan are dialects of the common Georgian language in
terms of both linguistics (sociolinguistics as well) and history. For the history see: T.
Putkaradze, Z. Kikvidze, for establishing the formula for the sociolinguistic profile of
the country; Republican Dialectological Scientific Session, Work plan and theses, October
24-25, 1996; T. Gvantseladze, The Question of Language and Dialect in Kartvelology,
Tbilisi, 2006.
412 “The Megrelian and the Svan languages were assigned the status of unwritten languages
in the Soviet Period” – T. Bolkvadze, Kartvelian Diglossia, Issues in Georgian
Literary Language: history and modernity (collection I), Tbilisi, 2007, p. 221. For discussion
on I. Stalin’s 95-year old qualifications see: T. Putkaradze, The Georgians,
2005, pp. 43-44.
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