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
22,000 (2007)[1]
- In Turkey: Latin script
- In Georgia: Georgian script
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]
Some distinctive features of Laz among its family are: