Language and alphabet

A language related to almost nothing

Georgian is Kartvelian, a family of four languages spoken almost entirely inside Georgia. It is not Indo-European, not Turkic, and not Semitic: there is no shortcut into it from Persian, Arabic, Russian or English, and its closest relatives are its own small neighbours, Svan and Mingrelian.

Its own alphabet

Georgian is written in Mkhedruli, a rounded 33-letter alphabet with no capital and lower-case distinction — one shape per letter, which makes it faster to learn to read than it looks. Three Georgian scripts have been used historically, and all three together went onto UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2016.

Spoken, the hard part is the ejective consonants, which have no English or Persian equivalent, and the consonant clusters, which are as long as they appear.

Getting by

In Tbilisi and Batumi you can manage without a word of Georgian. Russian is widely understood, especially by anyone over about thirty-five; English is common among younger people and standard in anything touching tourism. Menus, street signs and metro stations are routinely written in Georgian and Latin script together.

That said, a greeting in Georgian changes the temperature of a conversation immediately, and the list below is enough to do it.