Spoken in: Russia, Georgia, Turkey.

Region: North Ossetia, South Ossetia.

Total speakers: c. 700,000.

Language family: Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian, Eastern, Northeastern, Ossetic.

Official status
Official language in: North Ossetia, South Ossetia.

Ossetic or Ossetian (Ossetic: Iron ævzhag or Èðîíàó, Ironau, Persian: اوسِتی) is an Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus mountains on the borders of Russia and Georgia.

The area in Russia is known as North Ossetia-Alania, while the area in Georgia is called South Ossetia or Samachablo. Ossetian speakers number about 700,000, sixty percent of whom live in Alania, and twenty percent in South Ossetia.


History and classification

Ossetic is the spoken and literary language of the Ossetes, a people living in the central part of the Caucasus and constituting the basic population of the North-Ossetic ASSR, which belongs to the Russian Federation, and of the South-Ossetic Autonomous Oblast which belongs to the Georgian Republic. Ossetic belongs to the Northern subgroup of the Eastern-Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages. Thus, it is genetically related to the other Eastern-Iranian languages, e. g. Pashto and Yagnobi.

From deep antiquity (since the 7th-8th centuries B. C), the languages of the Iranian group were distributed in a vast territory including present-day Iran (Persia), Central Asia, and Southern Russia. Ossetic is the sole survivor of the northeastern branch of Iranian languages known as Scythian. The Scythian group included numerous tribes in Central Asia and Southern Russia, known in ancient sources as the Scythians, Massagetae, Saka, Sarmatians, Alans and Roxolans. The more easterly Khorezmians and the Sogdians were also closely affiliated, in linguistic terms.

Ossetian, together with Kurdish, Tati and Talyshi, is one of the main Iranian languages with a sizeable community of speakers in the Caucasus. It is descended from Alanic, the language of the Alans, medieval tribes emerging from the earlier Sarmatians. It is believed to be the only surviving descendant of a Sarmatian language. The closest genetically related language is the Yaghnobi language of Tajikistan, the only other living member of the Northeastern Iranian branch. Ossetic has a plural formed by the suffix -ta, a feature it shares with Yaghnobi, Sarmatian and the now-extinct Sogdian; this is taken as evidence of a formerly wide-ranging Iranian-language dialect continuum on the Central Asian steppe. The Greek-derived names of ancient Iranian tribes in fact reflect this pluralization, e.g. Saromatae (Σαρομάται) and Masagetae (Μασαγέται).


The evidence for Medieval Ossetic

The earliest known written sample of Ossetic is an inscription which dates from the 10th to 12th centuries CE and was found near the River Bolshoi Zelenchuk at Arkhyz. The text is written in the Greek alphabet with special digraphs.

Going beyond a direct transliteration of the Greek text, scholars have attempted a phonological reconstruction using the Greek as clues, thus, while τ (tau) would usually be given the value "t," it instead is "d," which is thought to be the way the early Ossetes would have pronounced it. The scholarly transliteration of the Alanic phrases is: "dæ ban xwærz,mæ sfili, (æ)xsinjæ kurθi kændæ" and " The passage translates as:

— The Alans I greet in their language:"Good day to you my lord, lady, where are you from?"
"Good day to you my lord, lady, where are you from?" and other things:
When an Alan woman takes a priest as a lover, you might hear this:
"Aren't you ashamed, lordly lady, that a priest is sleeping with you?"
"Are you ashamed, bride of my lord, who will have a priest?"

It is theorized that during the Proto-Ossetic phase, Ossetic underwent a process of phonological change conditioned by a Rhythmusgesetz or "Rhythm-law" whereby nouns were divided into two classes, those heavily or lightly stressed. "Heavy-stem" nouns possessed a "heavy" long vowel or diphthong, and were stressed on the first-occurring syllable of this type; "light-stem" nouns were stressed on their final syllable. This is precisely the situation observed in the earliest (though admittedly scanty) records of Ossetic presented above. This situation also obtains in Modern Ossetic, although the emphasis in Digor is also affected by the "openness" of the vowel. The trend is also found in a Jassic glossary dating from 1422.


Dialects

There are two important dialects: Iron and Digor—the former being the more widely spoken. Written Ossetian may be immediately recognized by its use of the æ, a letter to be found in no other language using the Cyrillic alphabet. A third dialect of Ossetic, Jassic, was formerly spoken in Hungary. The overwhelming majority of Ossetes speak the Iron dialect, and the literary language is based on it. The creator of the Ossetic literary language is the national poet Kosta Xetagurov (1859-1906).


Ossetic grammar

According to Ossetic researcher V.I. Abaev, “ In the course of centuries-long propinquity to and intercourse with Caucasian languages, Ossetic became similar to them in some features, particularly in phonetics and lexicon. However, it retained its grammatical structure and basic lexical stock; its relationship with the Iranian family, despite considerable individual traits, does not arouse any doubt. ”

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica 2006 Ossetic preserves many archaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes. The eight cases are not,however, the original Indo-Iranian cases, which were eroded due to pronunciation changes. The modern cases, except the nominative, are derived from a single surviving oblique case that was reanalyzed into seven new cases by Ossetic speakers.


Writing system

The first page of the first issue of the Ossetic newspaper "Ræstdzinad". Sjögren's Cyrillic alphabet. 1923Prior to the Russian conquest, Ossetic was reportedly an unwritten language. After the Russian conquest Ossetians used Cyrillic script: the first Ossetic book being published in Cyrillic letters in 1798. At the same time Georgian script was used in some regions to the south of Caucasian mountains: in 1820 I.Yalguzidze published an alphabetic primer, modifying Georgian alphabet with 3 special characters. That Georgian-based script was in use in the territory of South Ossetia (Georgian autonomy) in 1937–1954.

The modern Cyrillic alphabet was created by a Russian scientist of Finnish origin Andreas Sjögren in 1844: there were separate letters for each sound in that alphabet (much like in the modern Abkhaz alphabet). After a brief experiment with the Latin alphabet, Soviet authorities returned to the Cyrillic alphabet, with digraphs introduced to replace most diacritics.


Language usage

The first printed book in Ossetic appeared in 1798. The first newspaper, Iron Gazet, appeared on July 23 1906 in Vladikavkaz.

While Ossetic is the official language in both South and North Ossetia (along with Russian), its official use is limited to publishing new laws in Ossetic newspapers.

There are two daily newspapers in Ossetic: Ræstdzinad (Ðæñòäçèíàä, "Truth") in the North and Xurzærin (Õóðçæðèí, "The Rainbow") in the South. Some smaller newspapers, such as district newspapers, use Ossetic for some articles. There is a monthly magazine Max dug (Ìàõ äóã, "Our era"), mostly devoted to contemporary Ossetic fiction and poetry.

Ossetic is taught in secondary schools for all pupils. Native Ossetic speakers also take courses in Ossetic literature.