Zan language

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Zan
Spoken in:	Georgia, Turkey
Total speakers:	700,000
Language family:	South Caucasian  Zan
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	–
ISO 639-3:	–
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The Zan language, or Zanuri, is a conventional term used by some linguists to describe the unity of Mingrelian and Laz, which are the closest members of the South Caucasian (Kartvelian) language family. Mingrelian and Laz are not completely intelligible, but speakers of one language can recognize many words of the other.

The ancestral Zan language was spoken in ancient Colchis, a Bronze Age kingdom on the souheast shore of the Black Sea. For this reason, linguist A. Shanidze proposed the name Colchian for the united language. The term Zan comes from the Graeco-Roman name of one of the chief Colchian tribes, which is almost identical to the name given to the Mingrelians by the Svans (a northwestern Kartvelian group).

History

The Zan language had separated from the proto-Kartvelian language by the 8th century BC,^{[citation needed]} and was spoken by a continuous community stretching along the Black Sea coast, from modern day Trabzon, Turkey into western Georgia.

In the mid-7th century AD, Zan speakers were split by intrusions of Georgian-speaking peoples from Iberia (eastern Georgia), driven by the Arabs, who took over the regions of Imereti, Guria, and Adjara.

Separated by geography, and later by politics and religion, the northern and southern Zan eventually diverged into Mingrelian and Laz. Since the differentication was basically complete by early modern times, it is not customary to speak of a unified Zan language today. Presently, Laz is spoken by the Laz people in Turkey (and in a small portion of Adjara, southwestern Georgia), while Mingrelian is spoken by the Mingrelians primarily in Mingrelia (northwest Georgia) and Abkhazia.

References

• Amerijibi-Mullen, Rusudan (ed., 2006), K’olxuri (megrul-lazuri) ena: Colchian (Megrelian-Laz) language. ICGL (Universali: Tbilisi, Georgia), www.icgl.org. (see also the review of this book by Andrew Higgins.)
• Jost Gippert/Irakli Dzocenidze/Svetlana Ahlborn, The Zan language. Armazi Project: Georgian Academy of Sciences (Chikobava Institute of Linguistics).