A Short Grammar of Georgian

Tamar Makharoblidze Tbilisi State University

Georgian is the official language of Georgia. It’s the primary language of about 3.9 million people in Georgia itself (about 83 percent of the population), and of another 500,000 abroad (chiefly in Turkey, Iran, Russia, USA and Europe). It is the literary language for all ethnographic groups of Georgian people, especially those who speak other South Caucasian languages (or Kartvelian languages).

Georgian can be characterised as an agglutinative language. It shows split ergativity, poly-personal verbal constructions and has a subject-verb-object primary sentence structure.

A Short Grammar of Georgian starts with a presentation of the Georgian writing system. The following chapters discuss nominal and verbal morphology with a special focus on poly-personal verbal conjugation. The data is presented in a very simple way so that one can learn the general items of Georgian Grammar rather easily.

Besides the clear short description of Georgian grammar categories in traditional terms the author exposes some original views of the most complicated categories: such as version, personality, ergativity, destination and class-category.

ISBN 9783895861512. LINCOM Studies in Caucasian Linguistics 16. 128pp. 2009.