The Impact of the Social and Political Situation of the 19th Century Georgia on Language Functioning

Abstract

The presented paper analyzes the nature and extent of the influence of the socio-political situation of the country on the functioning of the Georgian language under the condition of Russian colonialism. It explains how the colonial regime changes the ecological environment of the language, which can be referred to by terms such as "linguistic imperialism" and "linguistic colonialism;" how a completely new linguistic space is formed in the country, namely, a linguistic hierarchy, the upper level of which is occupied by the language of the colonizer, and the lower level is the local language with significantly reduced areas of use; how consistently the social status of the colonial language is decreasing in the conditions of the increasing social status of the dominant language, and therefore its viability is threatened.

Using Joshua Fishman's theoretical framework determining the viability of the language, the paper outlines the areas of functioning the Georgian language in the analyzed period, and according to Louis Calvet's theory, Russian linguistic colonialism is evaluated as "vertical" of nature, because it was characterized by social diffusion. In fact, it could not move to the second stage - "horizontal", because it was concentrated in the capital and other cities and did not include the rural population, that is, the limits of its geographical spread could not be increased.