While Israel serves as a gathering place for the world-wide Jewish diaspora, it too hosts smaller diasporic communities of its own. One such community is that of the Circassians. Members of this community live in two villages: Kfar-Kama in the lower Galilee (population 2,900) and Reyhaniye further north, on the border with Syria (population 1,000). The roots of this community go back to the expulsion of the Circassians by Czarist Russia from their homeland in the North Caucasus. Most of the Circassians who survived the expulsion and the massacres ended …

The Northwest Caucasus – including Russia’s internal republics of Adygea, Karachai-Cherkessia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as parts of Krasnodar Krai in Russia proper – presents a veritably kaleidoscopic ethno-linguistic picture. As can be seen from this ethno-linguistic map of Karachai-Cherkessia, based on 2002 census data, Indo-European-speaking groups such as the Russians (shown in blue) and the Ossetians (in brown) coexist with Turkic-speaking peoples like the Karachais and Nogais (in two shades of green) and Turkic-speaking Greeks (in blue-green), as well as with ethnic groups who speak Northwest Caucasian languages (this …

Allegations of genocide are often politically charged. On January 23, 2012, the French parliament voted to criminalize the denial of the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In Turkey, by contrast, it is illegal to assert that the same acts were genocidal. The Turkish government remains adamant, threatening to impose unspecified sanctions on France for passing the new law. Turkish critics meanwhile accuse France of having engaged in a genocidal campaign of its own against Algerians in the 1950s. France is one of …

The Caucasus is rightly called a “mountain of languages.” Linguistic diversity reaches its extreme in the Russian republic of Dagestan and adjacent districts in northern Azerbaijan. The nearly three million inhabitants of Dagestan speak more than thirty languages, most of them limited to the republic. Such languages may seem inconsequential to outsiders, mere relict tongues of minor peoples. Yet a few of them are of historical significance, and the broader linguistic geography of the region provides evidence of important historical patterns stretching back for thousands of years. Historical linguistic relationships …

[This post is written in collaboration with Martin W. Lewis]
The history of the Georgian language reveals some interesting patterns of cross-cultural interaction. Georgian can be traced back to a ancestral language— Proto-Kartvelian—that it shares with its close relatives: Mingrelian, Svan and Laz. Spoken in the second millennium BCE, Proto-Kartvelian must have interacted closely with Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue to most European languages, as well as those of Iran and northern India. This connection is indicated by the so-called ablaut patterns (like the English sing-sang-sung), which Proto-Kartvelian probably borrowed from Proto-Indo-European, …

Readers who have carefully examined the maps of the Caucasus posted recently in GeoCurrents may have noted an area marked “Greek” in south-central Georgia. This Greek zone appears on most but not all ethno-linguistic maps of the region, sometimes as a single area, and sometimes as two. Depicting Greek communities here is historically accurate but increasingly anachronistic. Since 1991, the Greek population of Georgia has plummeted from over 100,000 to less than 20,000, due largely to emigration to Greece. Many of the remaining Georgian Greeks are elderly, and a few locales …

[Many thanks to Dave Howard for his assistance with this post!]
While it is indisputable that Ossetians speak an Iranian language, it is not immediately apparent whether they descend from an Iranian group such as the Alans, or alternatively if they are descendants of one of the autochthonous groups from the Caucasus, which adopted an Iranian language in the early Middle Ages or possibly even earlier; according to this second theory, prior to the adoption of an Iranian language, the Ossetians spoke some Caucasian language (more on which one below). Recent …