Dialects under Internal Migration: Linguistic Portrait of Georgia is a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Global Sociolinguistics (Special Issue on Georgian Sociolinguistics) by Marina Beridze, Nino Sharashenidze, Lia Bakuradze, and Zakharia Pourtskhvanidze. It offers a comprehensive sociolinguistic account of internal migration in Georgia over approximately the last 150 years, examining how successive waves of forced and voluntary migration have reshaped the geographical distribution and contact conditions of Georgian dialects.

The study argues that migration does not merely move people: it deconstructs, reconstructs, and replicates entire sociolinguistic networks — webs of social relations linguistically manifested and encompassing customs, architecture, cuisine, and cultural traditions. Drawing on the Georgian Dialect Corpus (over two million annotated tokens), archival materials from the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, statistical data from the Georgian Bureau of Statistics, and 19th-century Georgian press, the authors trace how demographic annexation under the Russian Empire, Soviet forced resettlement, and post-independence conflict-driven displacement have fundamentally altered the dialectal landscape of Georgia.

Introduction and theoretical framework

Georgia has experienced massive demographic change over the past approximately four hundred years. Historical migration processes range from prisoner-of-war displacement to state-imposed "demographic annexation." The wars of conquest of the Persian Shah Abbas I in the early 17th century, and the permanent invasions from the Ottoman Empire, turned large parts of the Georgian Kingdom into depopulated territories. Shah Abbas continued demographic restructuring by resettling approximately 80,000 families — predominantly from Kakheti (Eastern Georgia) — to Isfahan, colonising the vacated land with North Caucasian Muslim tribes.

The strengthening of the Russian Empire from the 18th century and its increasing influence in the Caucasus set the stage for a novel migration policy whose long-term consequences significantly determine the current demographic, sociolinguistic, and sociocultural landscape of Georgia. The study focuses on migration waves under the Russian Empire, the First Democratic Republic, and during Soviet rule, a temporal limitation justified by abundant archival material which, combined with dialectal language data, creates a coherent picture of migration and its consequences for the sociolinguistic landscape.

The authors distinguish three core analytical concepts:

• Deconstruction of sociolinguistic networks — concerns the point of origin of migration: how do networks dissolve and in which phases?
• Reconstruction of sociolinguistic networks — concerns the destination: are new networks established, and how does the receiving dialect influence incoming speakers?
• Replication of sociolinguistic networks — also concerns the destination: which parts of the original network are replicated unchanged and which are adapted through accommodation?

Classical theories of migration (Lee; Harris & Todaro) cite economic background as the primary cause. The present work departs from this framework in that it concerns internal migration and foregrounds geopolitical and sociocultural factors over economic ones.

Data and methodology

The primary data source is the migration database created within the long-term research project Linguistic Portrait of Georgia, based on empirical field research using a complex questionnaire applied across focus regions of internal migration. The questionnaire is structured geographically — Country → Region → District → Settlement → Village — and captures metadata including:

• Place and destination of migration
• Type, intensity, time, and duration of migration
• Reason for migration
• Populations arriving at and departing from destinations

The linguistic features arising from internal migration are documented in the Georgian Dialect Corpus (www.corpora.co), an annotated corpus with over two million tokens drawn from Georgian dialects. Additional sources include declassified archives of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, statistical data from the Georgian Bureau of Statistics, and 19th-century Georgian newspapers that remained taboo during the Soviet period.

Sociolinguistic networks under regional migration

Social networks can be analysed in two heuristic dimensions: temporal and spatial. In Georgia — 80% mountainous highland — historically difficult communication routes with seasonal inaccessibility fostered a millennial subsistence economy. Unlike the Black Sea coast or a few lowland centres such as Vani and Mtskheta, the Georgian-speaking area lacked a broad market tradition, limiting the scope for language contact and cultural exchange.

The mountain ecology placed natural limits on vital resources, generating social conventions that ensured peaceful use of shared goods. An example is the hunter's language — a cross-linguistic register functioning throughout the Caucasus to regulate the peaceful sharing of game. These rule-governed linguistic strategies frame sociolinguistic networks as their final product: the social characteristics of a community in a given ecologically and economically cohesive space are reflected in specific linguistic structures that define an ethnic unit and ensure its permanent existence.

In the Georgian context, migration types range from entirely involuntary (e.g., the Fereydani deportations under Shah Abbas) to largely voluntary economic migration (e.g., Imeretians to Kakheti). Between these poles lie ecologically driven migration, religiously motivated displacement, and Soviet plan-economy resettlements. The weight of individual types and their linguistic consequences is a central concern of the study.

Internal migration on the timeline

Russian Imperial period (1800–1917)

At the beginning of Russian rule, Georgia was considered highly homoethnic and compactly populated. Russian colonisation policy aimed to dismantle this coherence. Under administrator Tsitsianov, approximately 11,000 Armenians were resettled from Yerevan to the vicinity of Tbilisi in 1803. Subsequent waves established compact settlements of Greeks, Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Kurds, and Avars. From the 1820s, religious dissidents — Doukhobors and Molokans — were settled in Georgia, usually at the cost of suppressing native settlements.

Under administrator Ermolov (1816–1827), discharged Russian soldiers could acquire land and settle permanently. By 1860 at least ten such colonies existed in Western Georgia alone; twice as many Russian villages can be assumed across the entire country. After the Russo-Ottoman War (1828–1829), the Russian Empire took the South Georgian province of Samtskhe-Javakheti from the Ottomans. The Muslim Georgian population there faced such pressure that they relocated to the Ottoman Empire, while Russian General Paskevich brought approximately 30,000 Armenians from Turkey to settle the province. Before the war, more than 95% of the provincial population were ethnic Georgians; by 1832 Armenians had become the majority.

In the period 1897–1902, approximately 55,000 Armenians migrated to Georgia; the Armenian population of Tbilisi reached 127,000 — almost half of them recent immigrants. The Armenian share of the country's total population grew to 79% (relative to Georgian baseline), while the demographic growth of Georgians in the 19th century was only 9%. According to the 1917 census, Tbilisi contained 62,000 Georgians, 83,000 Armenians, and 70,000 Russians.

First Republic (1918–1921)

The First Democratic Republic inherited a demographic landscape created by Russian colonialism. The socialist government gave a special mandate to the Ministry of Agriculture to plan and implement resettlements in support of the Georgian majority. Approximately 25,000 desjatina of free land were identified in eastern Kakheti — enough for approximately 2,300 peasant families. The Ministry supported settlers with funds for relocation, house construction, and farm establishment, spending approximately five million rubles annually. The parliament enacted legislation on abandoned lands, declaring uncultivated land state property eligible for redistribution to local farmers.

Settlement district	Target villages	Families resettled	Area (desjatina)
Lagodekhi	7	1,239	12,000
Qaraiazo district	3	211	12,000
Tiflis district	4	206	1,002
Gori district	1	24	449
Telavi district	3	92	491
Tianeti district	1	11	83
Signagi district	1	80	13.5
Borchali district	1	24	165
Akhalkalaki	2	285	2,183
Total	23	2,072	12,745

Table 1. Destinations and numbers of the state-organised "West to East" migration programme, 1918–1921.

Soviet period (1921–1991)

The Sovietisation of Georgia combined violent deconstruction of traditional social structures with the installation of new Soviet networks. Because Moscow could not bring Sovietisation to the peoples of the high Caucasus, it relocated those peoples to the lowlands, forcing them into collective (kolkhoz) economic and social structures. Mass forced resettlements affected primarily the Georgian highlands and all peoples on both sides of the Caucasian mountain belt. A historically evolved sociolinguistic and cultural entity that had existed for thousands of years was destroyed permanently.

The migration destination during this period was predominantly South Georgia — specifically Adigeni, Akhaltsikhe, and Aspindza. When the same data are aggregated by region rather than individual locality, Tbilisi emerges as the overwhelmingly dominant migration target throughout the Soviet period (see Fig. 2).

The period 1937–1957 is particularly well documented through archival material (see Fig. 1). Major origin communities include qaraçaevi (713), sačxere (540), çageri (351), oni (280), and gurǯaani (333). The dominant receiving locality was Adigeni (4,070 persons), followed by Axalcixe (2,320) and various other southern Georgian settlements.

Around 1944 an exodus of approximately 100,000 Meskhetian Turks from Georgia was carried out by Soviet authorities, a deportation accompanied by further compulsory highland resettlements. The ecological catastrophes of the 1970s and 1980s produced an additional pendulum migration from Svaneti, Adjara, and Racha to South Georgia — movements towards Samtskhe-Javakheti and Kakheti that continue to shape those regions' dialectal profiles.

Third Republic (1991–present)

The migration waves of the Third Republic show abundant parallelism with political events: annexation and the so-called "ethno-conflicts" in Abkhazia and Samachablo (South Ossetia), fomented and controlled from Russia, resulted in almost half a million direct and indirect internal refugees in a country of approximately four million inhabitants.

The strongest flows directed displaced persons from Abkhazia and Samachablo towards Tbilisi and Imereti (Fig. 3). A separate stream of pendulum migration from Svaneti, Adjara, and Racha continued towards South Georgia in reaction to ecological deterioration in the sending regions (Fig. 4 below).

The Property and Land Commission

In the Georgian newspapers of the 1870s, critical articles appeared about Russian officials quietly acquiring large land plots. Massive land purchase was identified as a major social problem, and proposals emerged to establish a non-profit foundation to purchase land for Georgian farmers. Wealthy Georgian princes supported individual land purchases to prevent resettlement, backed by the National Land Bank, which from 1902 gained additional capacity for such activities.

In 1907, a Land and Property Commission was established to direct bank profits towards demographic "restoration." The strategy was to settle Western Georgian farmers on vacant land in Eastern Georgia — effectively an "internal colonisation" designed to counter Russian "external colonisation." The commission's legal mechanism was straightforward: indebted estates, seized by the bank for non-payment of loans, were sold at reasonable prices to Georgian farmer families willing to resettle.

Between 1907 and 1917 the Commission achieved the following: 11,430 peasant families received 216 plots of land covering a total of 50,849 desjatina, at a cost of 1,685 rubles per desjatina. New settlements were founded, including Serodan (Telavi district) and Axali Priuri (Tbilisi district). The commission can be understood as a joint social-strata response to demographic annexation — not fully compensating for its consequences, but meaningfully reducing them.

A special case is the Tiripona field in South Georgia, where the Russian military administration sought to expropriate approximately 20,000 peasants for a military polygon, planning to relocate them not within Georgia but to Kars (now Turkey), Zaqatala (now Azerbaijan), and the North Caucasus. Prince Giorgi Amilakhvari resisted by selling smaller parcels of his estate to the peasants at low prices, thereby consolidating the area's demographic profile.

Statistics and geography of internal migration

In Eastern Georgia (Kartli and Kakheti) approximately 800,000 peasants lived on 3,681,510 desjatina — about 462 desjatina per peasant. However, almost half the area was privately owned by princes, churches, and officials, with half the remainder consisting of forest and pasture. This "land hunger" provided the social context against which Russian plans to settle Russian peasants from across the empire were experienced as profoundly unjust.

Origin of settlers	Number	Origin of settlers	Number
Imereti and Racha	534	Refugees (Algerian-Georgians)	263
Kiziqi	502	Ossetians	12
Kartlians	245	Javakhians	32
Mokhevians	120	Pshavians	96
Khevsurains	72	Kakhetians	80
Germans	12

Table 2. The "West to East" state migration programme by origin community, 1918–1921.

The far-reaching consequences of this policy are visible today in the densely populated settlements in the far east of Georgia that linguistically belong to the Middle Western dialectal variety — a striking sociolinguistic indicator of successful large-scale internal resettlement.

Contours of the sociolinguistic portrait

Georgian dialectology has a 100-year research history. In the ideal "linguistic world" without migrations, the dialectal space can be imagined according to a "water circles" principle — a wave-like alternation of intensive and weak linguistic features defining a dialectal continuum. Migration appears as a crucial corrective sociological factor.

Three main spatial models describe Georgian dialects:

1. Model 1. The dialect exists within historically established geographical boundaries (applies to most dialects within Georgia).
2. Model 2. The dialect exists geographically outside Georgian territory and is linguistically isolated in contact with unrelated languages (e.g., Fereydani Georgian in Iran; Ingilo Georgian in Azerbaijan; Turkish-Georgian varieties).
3. Model 3. The dialect no longer exists within its historically developed geographical boundaries due to internal migration, forming internal "language islands" within Georgia.

The third model grew significantly at the end of the 20th century due to ecological disasters and Russian military intervention. Such internal dialect islands concentrate particularly in Kakheti and Samtskhe-Javakheti, supplied by sending regions with little arable land: Imeretian highlands, Khevsureti, Pshavia, Racha, Adjara, Mtiuleti, Gudamakhari, Lechkhumi, Svaneti.

Research on language islands (Mattheier) defines their essence as a cohesive community mobilised against assimilation. The linguistic areas created by internal migration share this dynamic: they cultivate emotional bonds to places of origin, construct collective memory, and create a linguistic ecology at the destination as a replica of the origin. The key difference from classical external language islands is that internally migrated dialects maintain contact with Standard Georgian — a factor that modifies but does not eliminate their tendency toward self-preservation.

A case study illustrates the pattern: a woman forcibly resettled from Samtskhe-Javakhetia to Guria returned nearly 40 years later having acquired features of the Gurian dialect. Her former community gave her the nickname /reize/ — a dialectal form of the standard Georgian /raṭom/ "why" — a form so persistently applied that when she died, her real name Tamara required special clarification.

The study also documents a migration file card — a standard documentation format capturing origin, destination, time, scope, type, reason, foundation narrative, and ethnolinguistic vitality. One example from Akahalsheni (Khoni County, Imereti) traces a 1910 migration from villages Ude and Vale (Adigeni County, South Georgia). By 1985, 68 resettled farms existed at the destination. In the first migrant generation, the original dialect was preserved intact; in the second, both codes were equally represented; in mixed families, the destination dialect predominated.

The concept of dialectal self-confinement

Dialectal self-confinement (Georgian: თვისსაზრდელი) is described in Georgian dialectology by Jorbenadze (1992) as the counter-process of accommodation. Whereas accommodation reduces contrastive features between contact varieties, self-confinement describes a saturation state in which dialects resist full assimilation. As Jorbenadze observes:

"Mutual influence (accommodation, among other things) is not the only force at work in dialect contact. If it were so, then the dialects in contact would pass over into one dialect over time. The reality, however, shows dialects coexisting in the long run, having preserved their linguistic peculiarity."

Self-confinement decisions — which features to block, which to retain as identity markers — are made on the basis of naive linguistics: speakers' folk-linguistic assessments of their own and neighbouring varieties. An example from Samtskhian-Javakhian illustrates this: the morphonematic thematic signs /-av/, /-am/, /-eb/ should theoretically have been realised as /-an/, /-en/ under dialect contact, but this feature is rare in practice and confined mostly to older speakers. By contrast, intonation features — /deda/ → /deda-i/ "mother"; /ȝma/ → /ȝmā/ "brother" — are retained precisely because they carry identity-conditioning function.

An untouched lexical isogloss between migrant codes in Samtkhian-Javakhian is the lexeme for "child":

At the destination (Samtskhian)	From the origin (Imeretian)	Highland origin (Mtiulian)
/bavšvi/	/bovši/	/balġi/

This isogloss even functions as a pseudo-ethnonym: /balġo/ in the vocative became a collective nickname for all migrants from Mtiuleti in Samtskhe-Javakhetia. Naive linguistic analysis is especially persistent across large dialectal distances. The Eastern dialects of Georgian are characterised by the complement vowel /-a/ and preverbs /ma-/ and /ša-/; Western dialects by /-e/ and /me-/; /ċu-/; /šo-/. These distinctive features serve as the basis for recognition, classification, and imitation — though imitations are typically hyperbolised, producing pseudo-dialectisms that do not actually occur in the source variety.

Particularly difficult for internal migrants is the adoption of spatial names at the destination. One language consultant (age 70, from Ninotsminda, Kaspi district), resettled at age 11, could meticulously list every toponym of his place of origin with eyes closed, yet displayed great confusion regarding toponyms at the destination — because the original population was no longer present to transmit local place names. Spatial orientation was rebuilt around personal reference points: the house of a known individual, or a country road.

The mountain Khevsur people, almost completely resettled to the Georgian lowlands (Kakheti), preserved their native dialect features with particular tenacity. A poem by an internal migrant from Khevsureti captures this:

Me ḳi čamave ḳaxeta, ḳldet magiera xenia...
„xolme" da „metki" siṭq̇vani satkmelad saḳvirelnia.

"I descended to Kakheti, where fields replaced the rocks,
Contemplating the words 'ხოლმე' and 'მეთქი', in wonderment it locks."

Conclusion

The physical migration of a person or group from one place to another is not a concluded process but the beginning of a complex chain of socio-cultural consequences. Migrants carry their entire world of origin imaginatively: they continue to use toponyms of the place of origin at the destination, preserve the ecology of that origin in language, erect new sacred sites replicating those left behind, maintain culinary identities as permanent self-measurements against the environment. All first-generation internal migrants wished to be buried in their place of origin; for the second generation, the logistical cost of this gradually overcame the impulse.

At the destination, migrants use language to identify pre-existing connections with neighbours. Social roles are built on this basis, oriented outward to the new environment. The old sociolinguistic networks are thus deconstructed, reconstructed, and replicated. Marriage traditions — where cultural or religious barriers are absent — represent an important integration platform.

The study establishes that the specific reasons for migration in Georgia have been shaped predominantly by the geopolitical plans of great powers — Russia above all — that artificially set migration waves in motion to achieve specific demographic compositions in their spheres of influence. The facts presented from archival materials do not reflect spontaneous economic processes but planned "demographic annexation" and the Georgian social response to it. Language — as the study demonstrates throughout — played and continues to play a central role in this process.

References

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Primary sources (Georgian press)

• /ertoba/ "Concord" (1918, N 134, N 144)
• /sakartvelos resṗubliḳa/ "Georgian Republic" (1918, N 99)
• /klde/ "Rock" (1918, N 4, N 10)
• /droeba/ "Present" (1873, N 43; 1880, N 202)
• /momavali/ "Future" (1909, N 53)
• Property and Land Commission, Reports (1907–1908; 1916)

Corpora

• Georgian Dialect Corpus. http://corpora.co