Svan/Udi/Tsova-Tush
The Caucasus region has been renowned since antiquity for the immense number of languages it hosts. We may conclude from statements of antique authors who referred to the Caucasus as a "mountain of tongues", that the comparatively small area extending between the Black and the Caspian Sea, with the Caucasus main ridge splitting it into a northern and a southern part, was the refuge of just as many distinct linguistic varieties then as it is still today. Taking the famous survey published by T. Halasi-Kun and others under the title of "Peoples and Languages of the Caucasus" in 1962 as a basis, we may assume that the Caucasus is the residence of at least 70 languages belonging to four linguistic phylums that are spread wide beyond the Caucasus area, viz. Indo-European (Armenian, Ossetic, Kurdish, Tati, Talyshi, Russian, Greek), Turkic (Azeri, Qumyq, Noghay, Karachay, Balqar a.o.), Afro-Asiatic (Aysor, Arabic) and Mongolian (Qalmyq), and three families that are believed to be authochthonous, viz. North-West Caucasian (also called the Abkhaz-Adyghe family, consisting of Abkhaz, Abaza, the Circassian languages Adyghe and Cabardian, and Ubykh which is assumed to be definitely extinct since 1994), North-East Caucasian (also called the Nakh-Daghestanian family, consisting of the Nakh languages Chechen, Ingush, and Tsova-Tush, the Avaro-Ando-Tsezian languages Avar, Andi, Botlykh, Tsez and many more, the Lezgian languages comprising Lezgian proper, Tabasaran, Tsakhur, Udi and others, as well as Lak and Dargwa which cannot be assigned to any of the subgroups mentioned), and South-Caucasian (or Kartvelian, consisting of Georgian, Megrelian, Laz and Svan) (cp. the linguistic map in http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/karten/kauk/kaukas.htm).
The fact that this diversity could persist for millennia in spite of the great many controversies the region has been facing since historical times is all the more remarkable as many of the languages in question are spoken by a few hundred speakers only and most of the languages, esp. those pertaining to the "autochthonous" Caucasian groups, have never been used in written form. As a matter of fact, not more than 10 of these languages have adopted a written standard, in connection with more widespread usage as lingua francas of certain regions. Only one of the autochthonous Caucasian languages, viz. Georgian, has a longer historical tradition as a written language, persisting uninterruptedly since the 5th century A.D.; for all other "literary languages" of the stock, the beginning of literacy was a matter of the late 19th century only, and it was only in Soviet times that they could develop a written tradition of their own (Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, Cabardian, Avar, Lak, Dargwa).
The historical steadfastness of the unwritten "minor" languages notwithstanding, it is clear that many of them are heavily endangered of becoming extinct today, much more than ever before in their history. The reason is that with the breakdown of the Soviet empire, the emergence of independent states and the beginning of armed conflicts in the struggle for independence, the conditions of life have become so much worse for smaller communities that many of them are now dissolving, with the result of the languages being abandoned. This is all the more regrettable since many of the languages in question have not been documented to such an extent that the peculiarities they are famous for in linguistics would have been preserved for future generations of investigators. It is true that a reasonable amount of linguistic fieldwork on most of the Caucasian languages has been undertaken, esp. by Russian and Georgian linguists in Soviet times, but also by Western scholars; but the material thus achieved and published is mostly very uniform and many facets of the linguistic variety of the languages in question have been neglected. Taking the Svan language, a cognate of Georgian spoken in the mountain regions of North-West Georgia, as an example, we may state that a considerable amount of texts has been published since 1852 when the first "Svan primer" (Lušnu anban) was printed, and several dictionaries and grammatical descriptions are also available (cf. the bibliography attached below); among the texts published, there are practically no specimens of conversational talk, however, the published material mostly consisting of fairy tales, stories on heroic deeds or descriptions of special customs, and it will be very difficult indeed to establish the rules of the formation of second person verbal forms or of the syntax of direct and indirect speech on their basis. We must further take into account that the Svan language comprises five (or four, depending on certain linguistic presuppositions) dialects which are clearly distinct from each other, and the state of art is by no means the same with all of them as far as the publication of textual material and the erudition of their linguistic structure is concerned. Audiovisual material illustrating the spoken language is not available for any one of these dialects.
With other Caucasian languages, conditions are even less promising as with Svan. For the Tsova-Tush language (also known as Bats or Batsbi) which is spoken in but one township of North-Eastern Georgia, we dispose of not more than 100 pages of published texts, a few grammatical sketches, and a Tsova-Tush-Georgian-Russian dictionary printed as a facsimile of a handwritten manuscript from the 1920ies. Given that the number of speakers of this language has already reached a critical minimum, with no members of the younger generation being willing or able to use it, the necessity of documenting this language is paramount.
It goes without saying that it would be impossible to document all endangered languages of the Caucasus region in one project. This is all the more true since the conditions under which these languages are used today differ to a huge extent depending on the overall political and economical situation of the states and areas involved. This is why for the present project, the applicants have decided to focus on three languages for which the necessary efforts of field work are at least feasible, given that they are accessible from Georgia which has been less deeply involved in armed conflicts in the recent past than other states of the region. Two of the languages in question, viz. Svan and Tsova-Tush, are spoken only within Georgia; the third language, Udi, is also spoken in Georgia, but only in a small community which has existed in a village named Ok_omberi since the 1920ies, while the main bulk of Udi speaking people lives in North-West Azerbaijan (villages Nij and Vartashen [now Oghuz]). The present project is aimed at documenting these three languages in the state they are in today within Georgia; for Udi, a documentation of its use in present-day Azerbaijan would be extremely welcome, too.