Linguistic minorities in Georgia and their everyday realities

Linguistic minorities in Georgia? Imagine two Georgian citizens, girls, one born and raised in Javakheti, the other in Kvemo Kartli, who meet in Russia and… talk in Russian because neither of them knows Georgian that well. One is Armenian and one is Azerbaijani. And this is what we’ll  talk about today – the situation of linguistic minorities in Georgia in today’s episode of the Caucasus podcast.

Listen to the podcast on our YouTube as well

Who are the linguistic minorities in Georgia?

Let’s start today’s episode with this perhaps unusual phrase – linguistic minorities in Georgia. This refers to groups whose first language is not a language commonly spoken in a given country, e.g., as in Georgia, Georgian. This means that, for example, in such a family, a different language is used at home and in the immediate surroundings.

Such linguistic minorities in Georgia include Armenians and Azerbaijanis living in Georgia, who use Armenian or Azerbaijani, respectively, at home, in their immediate surroundings, etc. These are not emigrants who came to Georgia a few years earlier, but Georgian citizens whose families have been living in these areas for decades or centuries.

You will learn more about the relations between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Georgia in episode 3, in which Klaudia Kosicińska and Anna Cieslewska talk about their field research. I also highly recommend this conversation to you.

And today we will focus on the linguistic aspect of these two minorities. Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani languages are not similar to each other because they are completely different language families. Therefore, when using Georgian, a Georgian will not communicate with an Armenian like an Italian with, for example, a  Spanish person. And there are three different alphabets. How did it happen that, having lived in Georgia since birth, not everyone knows Georgian?

Do you need to know Georgian to be Georgian?

This is what the Soviet ethno-linguistic policy left us with and it’s one of the major causes of the current state of affairs. Very often, older generations of Armenians and Azerbaijanis living in Georgia also know Russian. It is worth adding here that in the times of the USSR, there were schools with either Georgian or Russian as a leading language. And the latter, Russian, were often considered more prestigious, offering a chance to learn Russian fluently and pursue a career outside the Caucasus, e.g. in Moscow. As a result, there was no need to learn Georgian because Russian was sufficient.

Since the end of the 1980s, let’s call it Georgianness, being a „true” Georgian, has become even more closely associated with knowledge of the Georgian language. In research conducted in 2020 92% of respondents said that a citizen of Georgia should know the Georgian language. The second aspect is membership in the Georgian Church – 50% of respondents believed so. If representatives of linguistic minorities in Georgia do not know this language, they may be perceived by some as not full Georgian citizens and not treated on an equal basis with other Georgians. This sometimes leads to such communities becoming closed in on themselves.

What is it like to learn Georgian among linguistic minorities in Georgia?

So why didn’t our two girls from the beginning of the episode „simply” learn Georgian, e.g. at school? Here, the participants of the „How did I learn Georgian?” campaign come to us with the answer, in which Armenians and Azerbaijanis tell us that learning Georgian fluently is extremely difficult if they only learn it at school. If everyone in your home speaks a different language, most of your village or community speaks a different language, and you have no Georgian friends, learning Georgian enough to be able to study in this language or deal with matters at the office without any problems is almost impossible. The link to the campaign can be found in the article on our website.

And what does it look like from the data perspective? 49% of Armenians living in Georgia say they have basic or no knowledge of Georgian, while this level among Azerbaijanis reaches 75%. And according to NDI research from 2022 only 2% of representatives of linguistic minorities in Georgia speak Georgian fluently. Then let’s compare it with the general census. The latest data are from 2014, but they show us a certain scale – Azerbaijanis constitute 7% of all inhabitants of Georgia, and Armenians 4% so in total almost 400,000 people out of 3.7 million people. For comparison, it is the same as Bologna in Italy or Brno, second biggest city in Chech Republic.

Where do minorities live in Georgia?

Let’s look at this issue more broadly. In the case of Azerbaijanis, they largely live in the Kvemo Kartli region, on the border with Azerbaijan, and it is an agricultural area. In the case of Armenians, they often live or come from Samtskhe-Javakheti (the area bordering with Armenia), and a large number of Armenians also live in Tbilisi. Living in the capital, you can learn Georgian much faster than in a small town or village where the majority speaks Armenian. That is why this Armenian community from Tbilisi is different from the one from the east of the country.

Additionally (or perhaps as a result) these are poor areas, often underfinanced, with insufficiently developed infrastructure. These linguistic minorities in Georgia are more often forced by circumstances either to migrate for work or to take out quick loans. The lack of communicative knowledge of the language results in limited access to public information and dealing with matters in offices, e.g. funding for projects or small businesses.

Additionally, it limits the possibilities of access to information, e.g. on television or radio. As a result, Armenians and Azerbaijanis are more likely to watch Russian television with all the propaganda which we observe at present impacting them (according to data for 2020, 54% of Armenians and 13% of Azerbaijanis; for comparison, only 3% of Georgians), and Azerbaijanis additionally obtain information from Turkish-language sources. The Turkish language is very similar to Azerbaijani. Why don’t they use English-language sources? More than 70% of representatives of these minorities do not know or only know basic English. The statistics are lower among Armenians living in Tbilisi.

This also translates into having (or rather not having) representatives in local government authorities or parliament. That is, people who could speak more broadly about the struggles and support solving the problems of these communities. For example, in the 8 municipalities of the Kvemo Kartii region there are almost 800 Georgians, over 1,100 Armenians and almost 3,000 Azerbaijanis, and each of these groups has one representative in the local government authorities. At the central level, real representation is practically non-existent.

What are the Georgian teaching programs for linguistic minorities in Georgia?

Linguistic minorities in Georgia – this is definitely a difficult, complex and serious topic. So let’s look at what is happening to change the situation for the better. For several years now, there have been textbooks for learning Georgian as a second language (these are different teaching methods than for foreigners), teaching programs have also been created, and for literally few years there have been postgraduate studies teaching Georgian philologists how to teach this language as a foreign and second language. This wasn’t the case before.

In 2010, a special 4+1 program was launched, dedicated to representatives of linguistic minorities in Georgia who want to study at universities. They learn Georgian intensively for the first year and then start their studies in Georgian. From time to time, additional programs appear to give representatives of these minorities a chance to obtain education. Obtaining education and then a relatively good and stable source of income is a real chance to change the situation of individual families. Therefore, insufficient knowledge of Georgian is a potential source of many other problems for linguistic minorities in Georgia.

There are also problems with these initiatives. The salaries of teachers who teach Georgian as a second language are low even by Georgian standards. Additionally, these schools are usually located in rural areas or small towns, and therefore neither the schools are modern nor the infrastructure, such as uninterrupted heating or electricity supply, is not guaranteed. As a result, there are not many people willing to work there.

We are only talking about Georgian teachers here, and learning other subjects is a similar, if not greater, problem. If you don’t understand Georgian well enough, it will be difficult for you to learn geography or physics in this language. This is information collected during my research and interviews with such teachers, which I conducted for our publishing house, Języki Kaukazu – Languages of the Caucasus.

This topic is very close to me as a person who teaches Georgian and had the opportunity and resources to learn this language. And in order to support these groups with even a small action, we want to allocate 5% of the sales of our books and courses to support linguistic minorities in Georgia. Since we help foreigners learn Georgian, we also want to help Georgian citizens.

What does the issue of minorities look like as part of Georgia’s integration with the European Union?

There is a chance that more and more will happen on this topic, because eliminating the language barrier is one of the elements of the 12 conditions imposed on Georgia by the European Union, related to the protection of minority rights. Of course, language issues are not the only topic, for example there is also a broad aspect of religious minorities, which we will probably write a separate episode about someday.

There is still a lot to be done in this regard, also at the level of how Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis perceive each other. On the one hand, Georgians brought up in the realities of the war in Abkhazia and South Ossetia are often skeptical about other nations (which can be understandable) and the strengthening of their „non-Georgianness”, while representatives of minorities are afraid of assimilation tendencies and depriving them of their distinctiveness (which is equally understandable). Changes in this area will probably require decades of work from the central to the local level.

Our goal today was to show you the broader context of Georgia and the situation of linguistic minorities. If you want to learn more, we have links to additional sources and studies.

Useful additional resources