Georgian, or kartuli, is spoken by about 4 million people. As a point of reference, there are about 4.5 million people in the Boston metropolitan area, but in terms of size, Georgia is comparable to South Carolina. Georgian is one of those languages that developed in relative isolation, like Basque, so it isn't an Indo-European language, the most widely spoken language family. You can read more about it on the links, but basically, Georgian is in no way related to anything that we know.
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| Mkhedruli Script |
So far, I've found the language more challenging to pronounce than Arabic because it has many non-aspirated sounds, but I'm getting better. My sister likes asking me to say the word frog, which is baqkhaqkhi. Trust me, it's impossible, but it gives everyone a good laugh. I'm only just beginning to conjugate verbs, but it reminds me of Arabic in the sense that you add prefixes and sometimes suffixes to verbs.
I used this video at the end to learn to write the Georgian alphabet. It's pretty handy. The Georgian language has its own alphabet, the Mkhedruli script, which was developed between the 11th and 13th centuries. There were two earlier alphabets, but they're obsolete. I originally thought that I would be learning Cyrillic, but that didn't turn out to be the case. The modern alphabet has 33 letters, and it's phonetic, which makes my life a lot easier. There are also no capital or lowercase letters, so that's another plus. During orientation week, anyone who knew some of the alphabet was placed into the advanced Georgian class. By the end of the class, I felt pretty comfortable with the alphabet, but I don't think that we learned any more vocabulary than the other classes. We just covered the basics: Hello, How are you?, My name is Caitlin, Where is the bathroom?, etc. I have a long way to go before I'm anywhere near having a real conversation with my host mother, Bebia, and Babua.
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