Caucasian language of the Republic of Georgia, spoken by about 4.
1 million people worldwide. Georgian is unique among Caucasian languages in having an ancient literary tradition. The earliest attestation of the language is an inscription of AD 430 in a church in Palestine, in a script ancestral to that used for Old Georgian (5th11th centuries). The civil script used to write Modern Georgian, with 33 characters and no distinction between upper-and lowercase, was an offshoot of a script that first appeared in the 10th century. The origins of Georgian writing are uncertain, though it was presumably a free adaptation of the Greek alphabet , with new characters invented for the sounds peculiar to Georgian. Georgian has features typical of other Caucasian languages, including a large consonant inventory (with clusters of up to six consonants appearing at the beginning of a word).