Watch Your Language Blog

South Ossetia from a Linguistic Perspective

A look at the recent events in South Ossetia from a linguistic perspective, from The New York Times.

A war between the two groups in the early 1990s divided them almost surgically. Young Georgians stopped learning Russian, the lingua franca for the entire region in Soviet days; young Ossetians did not learn Georgian. Older people, who spoke both, pretended not to.

Magdalena Frichova, who monitored the conflict in South Ossetia for 10 years for the crisis group, recalled watching local officials wait, poker-faced, for a translator even when it was obvious that they understood. Over time, people began to struggle with languages they once spoke fluently.

(SUZANNE)

Tags: Georgia, linguistics, South Ossetia
August 26, 2008