Georgian Minorities. the Annual of Language & Polit

KOPEČKOVÁ, Lenka. 2012. Language policy in Georgia with focus on non- Georgian minorities. The Annual of Language & Politics and Politics of Identity, Vol. VI./2012 Reviewed journal ALPPI is published by Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Studies. www.alppi.eu Language policy in Georgia with focus on non-Georgian minorities Lenka Kopečková1 Abstract: The paper reports on the Georgian government’s language policy towards some of Georgia’s ethnic and linguistic minorities of non-Georgian stock with focus on the Kists. It presents the results of the original ethnographic research carried out in Georgia in August 2011. The research primarily aimed to investigate the linguistic situation of the Kists, a linguistic and national minority living in the Pankisi Gorge in north-eastern Georgia, and to identify their language needs, as well as analyze the Kists’ attitude to the governmental language policy. The ethnographic method of expert semi-structured interview was used as well, along with the study of official governmental documents and secondary resources of ethnographers and sociolinguists working in the field. Keywords: Kists, non-Georgian minorities, Georgia, diglossia, minority rights, native language Introduction In Georgia, which has been a multiethnic country for centuries, the Russian language is still used as a lingua franca even twenty years after the split-up of the Soviet Union, where its use had eliminated the need to learn the Georgian language. Since declaring independence in 1991 Georgia has been struggling to create a national identity using its language policy as one of the tools. The present paper aims to outline the governmental language policy towards non- Georgian minorities and their current needs with a focus on the Kists. First, it is necessary to clarify the concepts which are dealt with in the present study. The language policy is the crucial one. In the previous paragraph this term was used more in the sense of language planning, which are activities of certain members of the community that 1 Lenka Kopečková gained her Master’s degree in English philology at Silesian University in Opava in 2003, where she was teaching between 2004 and 2007. In 2009 she received Ph.D. at University of Ostrava after defending the thesis on the topic from the field of functional syntax and nonverbal communication. Her Ph.D. supervisor was Prof. Aleš Svoboda, the follower of the Prague School of Linguistics. Since 2008 she has been teaching phonetics and phonology, pragmalinguistics, sociolinguistics, translation, nonverbal and intercultural communication at the Department of English and American Studies at Faculty of Arts, University of Ostrava. She is a member of Vilém Mathesius Society, and is doing research on the rhematic layers in political speeches now. Her teaching interest in sociolinguistics brought her closer to the issue of language policy in Georgia, where she has travelled and carried out research recently. Contact: [email protected]. should alter the language practices (Holmes 2008, 98-112 or Trudgill 2000, 131-144). The term language policy, however, has other meanings as well. According to Spolsky it is “an officially mandated set of rules for language use and form within a nation-state” (2012, 3). Spolsky claims that the field of language policy consists of “the actual language practices of the members of the speech community” (Spolsky 2012, 5), the values that the community members associate with respective varieties (ibid) and the language planning, which was defined above. The last component of the concept will be discussed in the first part of the paper to set context for the presentation of all the three components of the language policy in relation to the Kists. The present paper aims to investigate the needs of the Kists, one of the non-Georgian minorities, and their relationship to the state language policy. It is divided into three parts. The first part outlines the language situation in Georgia, and the current language planning of the country and its major goals, focusing on the crucial non-Georgian minorities and their current needs. The second part presents the results of research based on informal interviews and mainly two expert semi-structured interviews with the Kists from the village of Duisi. The research was based on ethnographic methods (see Hendl 2008, 189-190; Tulmets and Střítecký 2008) involving several interviews conducted in Mestia, Akhalkalaki and Duisi by the author of the present article, as well as the study of official governmental documents and secondary resources of ethnographers and sociolinguists working in the field. One informal interview was conducted in Mestia, Svaneti in July 2011. The interviewee was a woman, an archeologist working in the local museum and an accommodation provider, between 45-50 years old. The interview took one hour in English as this was her language preference for the interview. The aim of this interview was to confirm the published results of previous research of the linguistic situation of the Svans (Popjanevski 2006). The other informal interviews, which took three hours, were held in Russian in Akhalkalaki, Samtskhe-Javakheti, in August 2011. The interviewees were two Georgian Armenians, aged between twenty-five and thirty. The aim was to confirm the published results of the research of the current linguistic situation and the interviewees’ attitudes to governmental language policy reforms which are underway in the country (Popjanevski 2006). However, all the above-mentioned informal interviews are not the focus of the present study; their results are occasionally presented to illustrate the situation of other non-Georgian minorities in Georgia, thus providing context for the presentation of a case study of the Kists. Finally, two expert semi-structured interviews were conducted in Russian and partly in English in Duisi, the region of Akhmeta in Kakheti, with a local Georgian language teacher and organizer of agro-tourism, and a young postgraduate student managing a local Chechen traditional music band and helping to run a family agro-tourism business. The setting of both interviews was the interviewees’ household. The interviews took about three hours, approximately ninety minutes each, and were transcribed by the author of the paper. The aim of the interviews was to investigate the linguistic situation among the Kists in Pankisi, their attitudes to the state language policy and their personal and local community language needs. The interviewees had been asked about their language preference for the interview. The teacher-interviewee decided to speak Russian, as her knowledge of English was basic. The student-interviewee also decided to speak in Russian most of the time, including some English passages, which seemed to have the function of expressing solidarity with the interviewer. Several informal interviews were also held with local residents of the village of Duisi, such as the leader of the Marshua Kavkaz NGO (aged over sixty, the interview took two hours), her son (aged over forty, it took one hour) and other villagers, all of them in Russian, in people’s households or in the village. All the interviewees will remain anonymous in the present article. The situation of the linguistic minorities in Georgia and the state language policy The Georgians form the largest ethnic group in Georgia (84%); whose total population is more than 4,300,000 inhabitants (“Main Statistics” 2011). The population that is Georgian by nationality includes Megrelians (or Mingrelians), making up between 10 and 18% of the total population (“Mingrelian” 2011), Svans and Laz (below 1%), living in Western Georgia, who speak languages belonging, like Georgian, to the Kartvelian languages of the South Caucasus, thus forming linguistic minorities. Megrelian and Laz form a subgroup within the Kartvelian languages, or they are sometimes regarded as two dialects of one language called Zan. All the Megrelian, Laz and Svan people seem to consider themselves Georgian by nationality. They use Georgian as a literary language at present, although there could and might have been attempts to change the situation as “During the time of cultural autonomy from 1930 to 1938 Mingrelian was a literary language. Several books, journals and newspapers were published at that time. Nowadays at least a part of the Mingrelian intelligentsia regard their native language as a literary language. This view is supported by an increase of Mingrelian publications in the recent years.” (“Mingrelian” 2011). In addition to the Georgians, there are the following ethnic groups in Georgia: Azerbaijanis (6.5 %) and Armenians (5.7%), Abkhazians (0.1%), Ossetians (0.9%), Russians (1.5%), Greeks (0.4%), Yezidi Kurds (0.4%), Ukrainians (0.2%) and the others (“Ethnic Groups” 2011). One of the smallest ethnic groups is the Kists. The Kist population stands at over 7,000 people (0.2%, “Ethnic Groups” 2011), most of whom live in the Akhmeta district in Kakheti region. The Abkhazians and Ossetians living in the separatist regions will not be discussed in the present paper. There seems to be a widespread diglossia (Holmes 2008, 27-35) among the Georgian citizens who speak Megrelian, Svan and Laz. They use their native languages at home and in communication with their neighbours, however, they become educated in Georgian. A similar diglossia also exists among other linguistic minorities who do not identify themselves with the Georgian nationality, e.g. the Kists, who will be the focus of this paper. Some sources claim that about 13% of the population of Georgia does not speak Georgian as their native language (Bachmann 2006, 7). However, what this claim does not seem to take into consideration is the fact that some Megrelians and Svans, who declare themselves Georgian by nationality (Kurtsikidze and Chikovani 2002, 16), often acquire another language as their first language too, or they are bilingual (Vamling and Tchantouria 1993). Therefore the percentage of the population speaking non-Georgian native language may be much higher, up to 20 or even 30% (Sedlářová 2011, 293).

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