Learn Georgian for Travel, Work and Study

The alphabet, Mkhedruli, has thirty-three letters and takes a week or two to read, because each letter has one sound and there are no capitals, no ligatures and no letters that change shape; the only difficulty is that no shape can be borrowed from Latin or Cyrillic. Five of the consonants are ejectives — a “p”, “t”, “k”, “ts” and “ch” said with a small burst from the closed throat — and Georgian distinguishes them from their ordinary, breathy twins, so “tari” with the plain t and “t'ari” with the popped one are different words. There is also a throaty “kh”, a voiced “gh” and a “q” from deep in the throat. Stress is light and the rhythm even.

Georgian has no grammatical gender and no articles, and its nouns take seven cases with regular endings. The verb is where the language concentrates its difficulty and its beauty: a single verb form marks who is acting and who is acted on — “he sees me”, “I see him” and “they see us” are each one word — and the tenses are organised into groups, called screeves by grammarians, that change the case of the subject along the way, so that the person doing something in the past takes an ending the present tense never uses. The counting is in twenties: thirty is “twenty and ten”, fifty is “two twenties and ten”. The word for father is “mama” and the word for mother is “deda”.

Georgian has a polite “you”: “tkven”, the plural, for strangers, elders and officials, and “shen” for friends, family and children, offered quickly. Respect is added with “batono” after a name or on its own — “ki, batono”, yes sir, is the everyday polite yes — and “kalbatono” for a woman. The culture of speech is formal in its courtesies and warm in everything else: guests are sacred, refusals are repeated three times before they are believed, and the toast, proposed by the “tamada” at the head of the table and answered by everyone, is a form of public speaking Georgians learn as children.

Standard Georgian is based on the speech of Tbilisi and the eastern lowlands, and the regions keep dialects that are plainly Georgian with their own words and music; the mountain valleys of Svaneti and the Mingrelian lowlands of the west speak related languages that Georgians treat as part of the family and outsiders cannot follow. Beyond the borders, Georgian survives in old communities in Turkey and in a corner of Iran, and among Georgians in Russia and Europe. Nothing else in the world is related to it, so no other language is a shortcut.

Georgian is a long language for an English speaker — the US Foreign Service Institute files it with Russian and Hindi, at some 1,100 hours of class before a learner works comfortably in it — and the hours go to the verb and to a vocabulary that borrows little from anything a Westerner knows. The alphabet is quick, the nouns are regular and the pronunciation, apart from the ejectives, is learnable in weeks. Learners describe a first stage of reading signs and ordering food with pleasure, a long second stage in which every verb is a puzzle, and a third in which the verb patterns suddenly repeat and the language opens.

In Tbilisi a visitor is answered in English by anyone under thirty and in Russian by most people over fifty; menus and signs in the centre are bilingual. Outside the capital and the wine-country guesthouses, Georgian is the language, with Russian as the common fallback and English rare. The international organisations, the technology start-ups and the tourist trade work in English; Georgian companies, the public sector, schools and courts work in Georgian. Universities teach in Georgian, and several run medical degrees in English for foreign students; a foreigner heading for a Georgian-taught degree spends the first year on the language.

• Mama is father: “Mama” means dad and “deda” means mum, and “bebia” is grandmother. Every foreigner gets this wrong once, in front of the family.
• Hello means victory: “Gamarjoba” is literally “victory to you”, the reply “gagimarjos” wishes it back, and the toast “gaumarjos” is “may it be victorious” — a nation's history in its greetings.
• Counting in twenties: Thirty is “otsdaati”, twenty-and-ten; seventy is “samotsdaati”, three-twenties-and-ten. French does it for eighty; Georgian does it all the way.
• Eight consonants, one vowel: “Gvprtskvni” — you peel us — is a real word, and “mts'vrtneli”, a trainer, is another. Georgians say them without effort and enjoy watching others try.
• No capital letters: Mkhedruli has one case only, so a name, a sentence and a title all begin with the same small round letter. Georgian is one of the world's few living alphabets with this habit.
• Georgia is Sakartvelo: Georgians call their country “Sakartvelo”, themselves “kartvelebi” and their language “kartuli”; “Georgia” is a foreign name, and the shared one with an American state is a coincidence Georgians have heard every joke about.
• The tamada: The toastmaster at a supra proposes every toast — to God, to the dead, to parents, to the guests, to peace — and nobody drinks between them. A foreigner asked to toast is being paid a compliment.

Georgian has no international certificate series and no exam series of its own on the CEFR model, and Georgia's famously open visa rules ask for no language at all: most visitors stay a year without a visa, and residence permits carry no language condition. The one legal threshold is citizenship. Naturalisation requires passing three tests set by the state — in the Georgian language, in Georgian history and in the basics of Georgian law — administered through the justice ministry's service agency; the language test is at an everyday working level rather than a numbered CEFR grade, and people married to Georgians or with Georgian ancestry have shorter residence requirements but the same tests.

For a document to show an employer or a university, learners use the certificates of the university language centres, above all Tbilisi State University's Georgian language programme for foreigners, which teaches by level and issues a certificate at the end of each; universities admit to Georgian-taught degrees after their own preparatory year or on such a certificate at an intermediate level. Employers in Georgia rarely name a level and judge Georgian in the interview. A learner in weekly classes reads confidently within two months, orders, bargains and greets within six, and follows a slow conversation after about a year; the verb goes on being learned for as long as the learner stays.

Georgian has few learner's materials and some very good ones, several of them free because they were built for volunteers and diplomats posted to the country. The self-learner needs the alphabet written out by hand for a fortnight, a dictionary that handles the verb forms — the hardest thing to look up in Georgian, since the dictionary form is buried inside the word you hear — and a steady supply of spoken Georgian: the public broadcaster's news for the standard, and Georgian polyphonic song, which is slow, clear and everywhere, for the vowels.

Georgian is a language in which a tutor saves years. The ejective consonants are heard in one's own mouth only when a Georgian says the pair back — “tari” and “t'ari” — and the verb system, which textbooks lay out in tables that frighten everyone, is learned by most people as a set of patterns absorbed in conversation with a patient speaker who supplies the right form each time. A tutor also teaches the table: how a toast is built, how a refusal is softened, and when “batono” is expected.