Caucasus languages like Georgian, Mingrelian, Abkhazian etc. Which main family do they belong to? ?

Question

All those nations in the Caucasus that most of us in the West never heard about until the recent war. They've got their own alphabets and their languages sound different from Turkish, Russian, Arabic etc. Are they Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, or Indo European languages like Russian, or Turkic, or a completely separate group?

Answer 1

Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz and Swan (or Svan) belong to a small language family called "Kartvelian" The Georgians call themselves "Kartveli" in their native language and that's where the term comes from.

The Georgians and Swans are both very old peoples mentioned even by the Ancient Greeks. The myth of Jason, the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece took place in what is now Georgia.

Some linguists (See Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Greenberg) classify the Kartvelian group as a linguistic isolate like Basque or Ainu. Other linguists place it in between the Indo-European and Hamito-Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic) languages like Hittite. However, they place Hittite a little closer to Indo-European and Kartvelian closer to Hamito-Semitic.

Abkhazian belongs to the western branch of the North Caucasian group of languages. They are unrelated to Georgian. Some linguists place Basque, Etruscan, North Caucasian, Bulushaski (spoken in Northern Pakistan) Sino-Tibetan (Chinese) and even the Athabaskan Indian languages of North America into a much larger supergroup called "Dené-Caucasian ."

The Dené-Caucasian  hypothesis is still controversial and hasn't been accepted by the majority of the world's linguists but personally, I hope its true.

All of the languages of the Caucusus are grammatically and phonetically complex. They have  rich inventories of consonant clusters which dwarf even the number of consonat clusters that you find in the Slavic and Germanic languages. For example, Georgian Sdstebian "They are wrong,"  bavshvs "to the child," vrskvlavi "star" and Brdznuli "Greek (language)."

The Turkic languages by contrast have far fewer consonant clusters and are characterized a lot of what is known as "vowel harmony" for example: soofoor "zero," küchük "child," gürültü "noise," karoosoo "his wife" etc.  

Answer 2

I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, Russian is not classified as Indo-European language but Slavic language. Though people of Caucasus do speak Russian  and Ukrainian as well. Azerbaijani people speak Turkic which is an Altaic language. and Armenians speak Armenian, an Indo-European language. Persian, Greek and Kurdish are other Indo-European languages spoken in this area.

Answer 3

The "Caucasian" group used to be described as language isolates but scholars who support the Nostratic hypothesis believe there are links to the Eurasiatic group. Please dont ask me to explain that in one paragraph!