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Demography
Although the data from the last (Soviet) census (1989) in these parts of the Caucasus are already a decade old, they at least provide a basis for discussing ethnic divisions.
Elucidation of ethno-linguistic terms
The term 'Georgian' has been used since ca.1930 within Georgia/former USSR as a general designation (superordinate) for speakers of all four of the South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages, namely Georgians proper, Mingrelians, Svans and Laz (although this last ethno-linguistic group lives almost in its entirety in the Laz traditional homeland, which today is incorporated within Turkey, running from the Turko-Georgian border along the Black Sea coast towards Rize)-there are also large numbers of ethnic Georgians who have ended up on the Turkish side of the border. I myself do not use the term 'Georgian' in what I deem to be this deliberately misleading enlarged sense (NB: this obfuscation of ethnic categories does not apply in Turkey), preferring the term 'Kartvelian', the same term as is used widely by linguists to refer to the relevant languagefamily which, as far as one can determine, is an isolate, seemingly being unrelated to any language/language-family spoken either today or in the past, Mutual intelligibility among these four sister-tongues is only possible between Laz and Mingrelian. It will be important to bear in mind the ethno-linguistic distinctions within the Kartvelian family during the discussion below.
The other indigenous language-family with whose speakers we shall be concerned in this section is North West Caucasian. This small family consists of Abkhaz (the most divergent dialect of which is Abaza), Circassian and Ubykh (extinct since 1992). A common synonym for Circassian is Cherkess-in Turkey the term 'Cherkess' has the wider sense of 'North Caucasian'. Linguistically speaking, the Circassian language, which is universally known to its native speakers as 'Adyghebze', can be divided into a western and an eastern group of dialects; somewhat confusingly, the western dialects alone are commonly referred to as 'Adyghe', and this is the source of the name of Adyghea (Adyghe Autonomous Oblast), where the majority of western Circassian speakers remaining in the Caucasian homeland are concentrated-a further 10,000 or so speakers of the western dialect Shapsugh are found around the Black Sea town of Tuapse ('Two Rivers' in its Circassian eytmology) in Russia's Krasnodar Region....