Documentation of Megrelian: A Report on Linguistic Expeditions to Samegrelo (2022-2023)

Abstract

During the summers of 2022 and 2023, linguistic expeditions were carried out to Samegrelo. Within this initiative, linguistically valid, genre- and thematically diverse material, totaling up to 55 hours, was generated for the FLEx program so as to document the current sociolinguistic situation in Samegrelo. This was done through pre-designed questionnaires.
The field material from 2022 was entered into FLEx and processed for 6 hours and 23 minutes. This comprised 102 pages of text, consisting of 3,481 sentences and 26,972 unique forms.
At the current stage, the linguistic evidence suggests that the dialects of the Megrelian language do not show a tendency towards uniformity. Instead, they maintain distinctions at the phonetic, morphonological, and morphological levels. Generally, changes in the Megrelian language affect vocabulary and syntax, and are caused by the influence of Georgian.