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Laz language

The Laz language or Lazuri (Laz: ლაზური ნენა, romanized: lazuri nena) is a Kartvelian language spoken by the Laz people on the southeastern shore of the Black Sea.[2] In 2007, it was estimated that there were around 20,000 native speakers in Turkey, in a strip of land extending from Melyat to the Georgian border (officially called Lazistan until 1925), and around 1,000 native speakers around Adjara in Georgia. There are also around 1,000 native speakers of Laz in Germany.[1]

Laz

Laz is not historically a written language or literary language. As of 1989, Benninghaus could write that the Laz themselves had no interest in writing in Laz.[3]

Classification[edit]

Laz is one of the four Kartvelian languages also known as South Caucasian languages. Along with Mingrelian, it forms the Zan branch of this Kartvelian language family. The two languages are very closely related, to the extent that some linguists refer to Mingrelian and Laz as dialects or regional variants of a single Zan language, a view held officially in the Soviet era and still so in Georgia today. In general, however, Mingrelian and Laz are considered as separate languages, due both to the long-standing separation of their communities of speakers (500 years) and to a lack of mutual intelligibility.

History[edit]

Although the Laz people are recorded in written sources repeatedly from antiquity onwards, the earliest written evidence of their language is from 1787. There is a poem in Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatnâme (17th century) that has been interpreted as Laz, but it is more likely to represent Pontic Greek. The first definite record of Laz in 1787 was produced by the Spanish Jesuit linguist Lorenzo Hervás. It was largely ignored because Hervás conflated the name of the language with that of the Lezgian language, calling it lingua Lasga, detta ancora Laza, e Lassa. In 1823, Julius Heinrich von Klaproth published a list of 67 Laz words with German translations in his Asia Polyglotta. He identified three dialects. In 1844, Georg Rosen published in German the first monograph on Laz, Über die Sprache der Lazen. In 1887, the British diplomat Demetrius Rudolph Peacock included Laz among five languages of the western Caucasus in a paper designed for the use of English-speaking diplomats.[4]

All nouns end with a vowel.

More extensive verb inflection, using directional prefixes.

Some lexical borrowings from Greek and .

Turkic languages

Some distinctive features of Laz among its family are:

Colchis

Kaskian language

Anderson, Ralph Dewitt. (1963). A Grammar of Laz. Ann Arbor: UMI. (Doctoral dissertation, Austin: University of Texas at Austin; vi+127pp.)

Grove, Timothy (2012). Materials for a Comprehensive History of the Caucasus, with an Emphasis on Greco-Roman Sources.

A Star in the East: Materials for a Comprehensive History of the Caucasus, with an Emphasis on Greco-Roman sources (2012)

Kojima, Gôichi (2003) Lazuri grameri Chiviyazıları, Kadıköy, İstanbul,  975-8663-55-0 (notes in English and Turkish)

ISBN

Nichols, Johanna (1998). The origin and dispersal of languages: Linguistic evidence. In N. G. Jablonski & L. C. Aiello (Eds.), The origin and diversification of language. San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences.

Nichols, Johanna (2004). The origin of the Chechen and Ingush: A study in Alpine linguistic and ethnic geography. Anthropological Linguistics 46(2): 129–155.

Özüm Ak, Zeynep (2018). Understanding the problems of the support of an endangered language in typography: Proposal of a typeface that supports the Laz language. Escola Superior de Arte e Design de Matosinhos. :10400.26/22318.

hdl

Tuite, Kevin. (1996). Highland Georgian paganism — archaism or innovation?: Review of Zurab K’ik’nadze. 1996. Kartuli mitologia, I. ǰvari da saq’mo. (Georgian mythology, I. The cross and his people [sic].). Annual of the Society for the Study of Caucasia 7: 79–91.

(in Turkish)

Lazkulturdernegi.org.tr

(in Turkish)

Laz Cultur – Information about Lazs, Laz Language, Culture, Music

(in Turkish)

Laz Cultur – Information about Lazs, Laz Language, Culture, Music

(in Turkish)

Laz Cultur – Information about Lazs, Laz Language, Culture, Music and Laz Diaspora

by Silvia Kutscher.

Lazuri Nena – The Language of the Laz

Laz-Turkish full dictionary in word format

on Yahoo! GeoCities

Samples of Laz Language in English, Dutch and Turkish, Arzu Barské – Erdogan

on Yahoo! GeoCities

Laz history and language, Lazlar, Yilmaz Erdogan

Laz Georgian-Latin and Latin-Georgian converter