Ossetian language

Ossetian 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 republic of North Ossetia–Alania, which belongs to the Russian Federation, and of South Ossetia, which is de facto independent (but is de jure part of the Georgian Republic according to most other states). Ossetian belongs to the Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages (as hinted by its endonym, ирон). Within Iranian it is placed in an Eastern subgroup and further to a Northeastern sub-subgroup, but these are areal rather than genetic groups. The other Eastern Iranian languages such as Pashto and Yaghnobi show certain commonalities but also deep-reaching divergences from Ossetic.

From deep Antiquity (since the 7th–8th centuries BC), the languages of the Iranian group were distributed in a vast territory including present-day Iran (Persia), Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Ossetian is the sole survivor of the branch of Iranian languages known as Scythian. The Scythian group included numerous tribes, 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 sizable 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 may be the Yaghnobi language of Tajikistan, the only other living Northeastern Iranian language.[8][9] Ossetian 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 names of ancient Iranian tribes (as transmitted through Ancient Greek) in fact reflect this pluralization, e.g. Saromatae (Σαρομάται) and Masagetae (Μασαγέται).[10]^:69

There are two important dialects: Digor (distributed in the west of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania and Kabardino-Balkaria) and Iron (in the rest of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania and in South Ossetia and Karachay-Cherkessia),[6] spoken by one-sixth and five-sixths of the population, respectively. A third dialect of Ossetian, Jassic, was formerly spoken in Hungary.

The Iron dialect of Ossetic has 7 vowels:

The Ossetian researcher V. I. Abayev distinguishes 26 consonants, to which five labialized consonants and two semivowels may be added. Unusually for an Indo-European language, there is a series of glottalized (ejective) stops and affricates. This can be considered an areal feature of languages of the Caucasus.

Voiceless consonants become voiced word-medially (this is reflected in the orthography as well). /t͡ʃ/, /d͡ʒ/, and /t͡ʃʼ/ were originally allophones of /k/, /ɡ/, and /kʼ/ when followed by /e/, /i/ and /ɘ/; this alternation is still retained to a large extent.

Stress normally falls on the first syllable, unless it has a "weak" vowel (/ɘ/ or /ɐ/), in which case it falls on the second syllable. In the Iron dialect, definiteness is expressed in post-initially stressed words by shifting the stress to the initial syllable. This reflects the fact that historically they received a syllabic definite article (as they still do in the Digor dialect), and the addition of the syllable caused the stress to shift.[8]

According to V.I. Abaev,[8]

In the course of centuries-long propinquity to and intercourse with Caucasian languages, Ossetian 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.

Ossetic text written with Georgian script, from a book on Ossetian folklore published in 1940 in South Ossetia

Written Ossetian may be immediately recognized by its use of the Cyrillic letter Ae (Ӕ ӕ), a letter to be found in no other language using Cyrillic script. The father of the modern Ossetian literary language is the national poet Kosta Khetagurov (1859–1906).[8]

An Iron literary language was established in the 18th century, written using the Cyrillic script in Russia and the Georgian script in Georgia. The first Ossetian book was published in Cyrillic in 1798, and in 1844 the alphabet was revised by a Russian scientist of Finnish-Swedish origin, Andreas Sjögren. A new alphabet based on the Latin script was made official in the 1920s, but in 1937 a revised Cyrillic alphabet was introduced, with digraphs replacing most diacritics of the 1844 alphabet.

In 1820, I. Yalguzidze published a Georgian-script alphabetic primer, adding three letters to the Georgian alphabet.[19] The Georgian orthography receded in the 19th century, but was made official with Georgian autonomy in 1937. The "one nation – two alphabets" issue caused discontent in South Ossetia in the year 1951 demanding reunification of the script, and in 1954 Georgian was replaced with the 1937 Cyrillic alphabet.

The table below shows the modern Cyrillic alphabet, used since 1937, with phonetic values for the Iron dialect in the IPA. Di- and tri-graphs in parentheses are not officially letters of the alphabet, but are listed here to represent phonemically distinctive sounds:

In addition, the letters ⟨ё⟩, ⟨ж⟩, ⟨ш⟩, ⟨щ⟩, ⟨ъ⟩, ⟨ь⟩, ⟨э⟩, ⟨ю⟩, and ⟨я⟩ are used to transcribe Russian loans.

In addition, the letters ⟨š⟩ and ⟨ž⟩ were used to transcribe Russian words. The "weak" vowels ⟨ӕ⟩ [ɐ] and ⟨ы⟩ [ɘ] are extremely common in the language.

The first page of the first issue of the Ossetian newspaper Rӕstdzinad. Sjögren's Cyrillic alphabet. 1923

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

While Ossetian is the official language in both South and North Ossetia (along with Russian), its official use is limited to publishing new laws in Ossetian newspapers. There are two daily newspapers in Ossetian: Rӕstdzinad (Рӕстдзинад / Рӕстꚉінад, "Truth") in the North and Xurzӕrin (Хурзӕрин, "The Sun") in the South. Some smaller newspapers, such as district newspapers, use Ossetian for some articles. There is a monthly magazine Max dug (Мах дуг, "Our era"), mostly devoted to contemporary Ossetian fiction and poetry.

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

The first Ossetian language Bible was published in 2010.[7] It is currently the only full version of the Bible in the Ossetian language.[20]

The following table illustrates some common Ossetic words with cognates or translations in other Indo-Iranian and other Indo-European languages.

• Alans
• Jász people
• Jassic dialect

• Abaev, V.I. A grammatical sketch of Ossetic (Russian version)
• Abaev, V.I. Ossetian Language and Folklore, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow-Leningrad, 1949
• Arys-Djanaieva, Lora. Parlons Ossète. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004, ISBN 2-7475-6235-2.
• Dalby, Andrew (1998). Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More Than 400 Languages. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-11568-1.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• "Ossetian". Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press. September 2005. Retrieved 2 December 2017. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Ivanov, Sergey A.; Lubotsky, Alexandr (2010). "An Alanic Marginal Note and the Exact Date of John II's Battle with the Pechenegs". Byzantinische Zeitschrift. 103: 595–603. doi:10.1515/byzs.2010.017. hdl:1887/18310.
• Nasidze, Ivan; Quinque, Dominique; Dupanloup, Isabelle; Rychkov, Sergey; Naumova, Oksana; Zhukova, Olga; Stoneking, Mark (2004). "Genetic Evidence Concerning the Origins of South and North Ossetians". Annals of Human Genetics. 68 (6): 588–599. doi:10.1046/j.1529-8817.2004.00131.x. PMID 15598217.
• Windfuhr, Gernot (2013). The Iranian Languages. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-79703-4.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
• Zgusta, Ladislav (1987). The Old Ossetic Inscription from the River Zelencuk. [Illustr.] - Wien: Verl. D. Österr. Akad. D. Wiss. 1987. 68 S., 1 Bl. Kt. Gr. 8° (Veröffentlichungen D. Iranischen Kommission. 21.) (Österr. Akad. D. Wiss., Phil. -hist. Kl. Sitzungsberichte. 486.). Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. ISBN 978-3-7001-0994-5.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

Ossetic edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Ossetian.

• Web portan on documentation and grammatical studies of Ossetic (in English)
  • Ossetic National Corpus(in English)
• Genetic Evidence Concerning the Origins of South and North Ossetians
• An article on Ossetic grammar(in English) by Fridrik Thordarson
• Ossetic language page at the Minority languages of Russia on the Net project (in Russian)
• History of the Ossetian writing system and a comprehensive table of characters (in Russian)
• Ossetic language materials in English and partly French
• Laboratory of Field Linguistics: Ossetic (studies on Ossetic grammar, modern spoken texts in Ossetic) (in English)
• Omniglot – Ossetian (Ирон ӕвзаг / Дигорон ӕвзаг)
• Ossetic (Iron and Digor) basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
• Russian-Ossetic On-Line Dictionary