Historical Overview of Foreign Language Teaching in Georgia

Because Georgia is a multicultural and multinational country, the study of languages has traditionally been considered significant in the nation. According to the eleventh century Georgian historian, chronicler, and ecclesiastic Leonti Mroveli, five languages in addition to Georgian were spoken in Kartli (a historical region of Georgia) from as early as the sixth century BC: Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, Hebrew, and Khazar. These languages were spoken by all the kings of Kartli, as well as by ordinary men and women; this multilingualism is emblematic of the way Georgians peacefully cohabited with different minority groups in a society that respected cultural diversity.

From the fourth century of the common era, the Greek language was a mandatory subject, along with philosophy and rhetoric, at Georgian-Greek rhetoric schools in the west part of Georgia, and numerous translations from Georgian to Greek were produced during the period. Persian and Arabic were also taught in Georgia for both political and cultural reasons, and translations of literary, philosophical, and religious texts into and out of these languages were also undertaken. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Syrian were compulsory school subjects at the ecclesiastical academies of Gelati and Ikalto. Western European languages were introduced at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which can be considered a consequence of the Italian and French Catholic missionaries’ work undertaken in Georgia.