Representatives of Public Defender's Office Meet with Lahiji Community
On September 29, 2016, Koba Chopliani and Izabella Osipova, representativesofthe Public Defender's Office and the Tolerance Centre, and Giorgi Sordia, Head of the Study Center for Ethnicity and Multiculturalism, met with representatives of the Lahiji community living in the village of Gombori, Sagarejo municipality of Georgia.
The Lahiji people arrived in Georgia from Azerbaijan in the early 20th century and regard themselves as Azerbaijani. At present, the Lahiji community of Gombori includes about 100-120 people. They are concerned about the fact that their mother language is disappearing; the large part of the young people does not speak it any more; only the older generation uses it. Lahiji is not a written language; it was mostly spoken in the families, but due to the mixed families and the lack of appropriate conditions for preservation-development of a language, it is gradually disappearing. The Lahiji community has no hopes for preserving its native language and cannot see any solution to the problem.
The name of the Lahiji language comes from the town of Lahij situated in Azerbaijan’s Ismailli district, where most of the Lahiji people live. Linguists think that the language spoken by the Lahiji community of Georgia is in fact the Tati language belonging to the south-western group of the Persian language. The majority of Tati-language speakers live in Iran, Azerbaijan and Dagestan.
The Lahiji community has lost many elements of its ethnic culture apart from the language; they have maintained the so-called Lahiji ax and other household items.
According to the UNESCO data, the Tati language and one of its branches – the so-called Lahiji dialect is put on the list of dying languages.
The Public Defender, the Tolerance Center of the Public Defender and the Council of National Minorities of the Public Defender plan to continue to study the situation of the Lahiji community in Georgia and the issue of preservation of the Lahiji (Tat) language and culture.
The meeting was organized by the Public Defender, the Tolerance Center, the Council of National Minorities and the “Promoting Integration, Tolerance and Awareness” (PITA) program of the UN Association of Georgia (UNAG) that is funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
