Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index The South Caucasian languages or Kartvelian languages are a family of languages, spoken mainly in Georgia South Caucasian languages include: Georgian (Kartuli ena) - official language of Georgia, more than 4 million native speakers Mingrelian - appr. 300,000 native speakers Laz - estimates vary from 50,000-250,000 speakers. Mainly spoken in the Black Sea littoral area of Northeast Turkey. Svan - appr. 35,000 native speakers in the northern mountainous region of Georgia There is some ongoing work on the possible genetic relationship between speakers of South Caucasian languages and the Basque language, and some recent theories propose a phyletic link between Proto-South Caucasian and Proto-Indo-European. The Proto-Indo-European connection is quite promising, but most evidence for uniting the South Caucasian languages with Basque is based on surface morphology. While the South Caucasian languages share SOV word order with Basque, as well as an ergative case, the application of the ergative is somewhat different between the two families. External Links http://people.cornell.edu/pages/bcp6/basque.doc This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.