OSSETIC LANGUAGE

eastern Iranian language spoken in the northern Caucasus by the Ossetes. There are two major dialects: (1) eastern, called Iron, and (2) western, called Digor. The majority of the Ossetes speak Iron, which is the basis of the literary language now written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Ossetic is the modern descendant of the language of the ancient Alani, a Sarmatian people, and the medieval As. It preserves many archaic features of Old Iranian, such as eight cases and verbal prefixes. The phonology of the language has been greatly influenced by the non-Indo-European languages of the Caucasus, and the present vocabulary has many loanwords from Russian. There are many folk epics in Ossetic; the most famous are the tales about hero warriors, the Narts. The literary language was established by the national poet Kosta Khetagurov (18591906).