Ossetian

The Ossetians call themselves Ir or Iron, and their language Iron ævzag. It is an Eastern Iranian language, and the only Iranian language native to the central Caucasus, where it is spoken in North Ossetia–Alania in the Russian Federation and in South Ossetia, whose status is disputed: most states regard it as part of Georgia, while Russia recognised it as independent in 2008. Ossetian has two main dialects, Iron, the basis of the literary language, and Digor, spoken in the west of North Ossetia, which some speakers treat as a separate language.

Ossetian descends from the language of the Alans, a people of the steppe who appear in Roman and Byzantine sources and who settled in the northern Caucasus in the early Middle Ages, and through them from the Sarmatian and Scythian speech of the ancient steppe. It has absorbed much from its Caucasian neighbours, including sounds that Persian lacks, but its core vocabulary remains Iranian. The word don, ‘water’ or ‘river’, is the same old Iranian word that many scholars see behind the names of the Don, the Dnieper and the Danube.

The Nart sagas

The great treasure of Ossetian oral literature is the cycle of Nart sagas, stories of a heroic race of warriors, among them the wise woman Satana, the trickster Syrdon and the steel-bodied Soslan. The Nart tales are shared with the Circassians, Abkhaz and other Caucasian peoples, but the Ossetian versions have drawn particular interest from scholars such as Georges Dumézil, who saw in them echoes of the Scythian world described by Herodotus. They were long recited by bards to the music of the fændyr.

Ossetian religious life blends Orthodox Christianity, Islam among a minority, and older traditions of sacred groves and shrines. Uastyrdzhi, the Ossetian St George, protector of men and travellers, is honoured above all, and his festival, Dzheorguyba, in late November, is one of the great feasts of the year. At every gathering an elder raises a glass and prays aloud in Ossetian, and three round pies, laid one on another, stand on the table.

Writing Ossetian

Ossetian was first printed in the eighteenth century, and has been written in Cyrillic, Latin and, for a time in South Ossetia, Georgian letters; it has been written in Cyrillic in North Ossetia since 1938 and in South Ossetia since 1954, with the letter æ for its distinctive vowel. Its national poet is Kosta Khetagurov, whose collection Iron Fændyr, ‘The Ossetian Lyre’, appeared in 1899. Russian is now dominant in towns, and UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger lists Ossetian, but it remains a language of village life, church and festival, and of the toast-making that marks every Ossetian feast.