South Caucasian (Iverian) is now spoken by about two million speakers, who represent an ancient language-community known to old Greek as lβnρες (Iberi). This name survives in the stunted Armenian form ‘Virk’ (‘Georgians’), in which the aspirated final consonant is the plural sign. N. J. Marr, partly Georgian himself, identifies ‘Iber’/‘Iver’ with ‘Imer’, as in Imerian (Imeretian), a Georgian dialect, and even with ‘Kimer’ (Cimmerian), but this seems far-fetched, although less so than is usual with this erratic thinker. The connection of Georgian with a comparatively distant medieval past however is established by a fifth-century inscription at Bolnis Sion and especially by its literature, which has been known since the tenth century in association with two distinctly formed alphabets—the ecclesiastical and angular ‘khutsuri’ (‘priestly hand’), found in both uncial and minuscule form, and the civil and rounded ‘ mkhedruli’ (‘knightly hand’), which is said to be the invention of the Georgian king Parnavaz. The mkhedruli alphabet of thirty-nine signs is possibly older than the khutsuri, traditionally thought to have been devised by the Armenian bishop St Mesrop. Both alphabets derive, like the Armenian, from a Greek-modified Semitic pattern and are arranged mostly in Semitic order, the non-Semitic sounds coming at the end of the series. An attempt to latinise the mkhedruli in 1926 did not reach beyond typewriting and business correspondence. Till the early 1920's Georgian was the only South Caucasian language with a literary culture. Since then all the other types of South Caucasian have received an alphabet and a literary language, and the literature of both Georgian and its cognates has been considerably enriched in many directions.

Georgian (Kartvelian) appears in several dialectal forms, one of which, viz. Imerian, has already been alluded to. The others are Gurian, Pshav, Thush (not interchangeable with Tsova- Tush, or Bats, a North Caucasian language), Khevzur, Ingilo (the last four bordering geographically on Lezgin), Mthiul, Rachin, Kakhetin, and Meskh. Mingrelian (Megrel) and Laz (Chan), the latter spoken in the Ajar Autonomous Republic (capital Batumi, formerly Batum) and mainly in Turkish Lazistan, are connected almost as dialects, though separated by a considerable distance. The present-day fashion is to regard them as two forms of a common Zan. The conservative and divergent Svanetian (Svan), on the other hand, exhibits less family likeness and is kept apart. It is in immediate contact with North-West Caucasian.