In Georgia you don’t hear Ossetian often these days.

Belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages, Ossetian was classified by UNESCO as “vulnerable”, the first step of the organization’s scale of languages at risk of disappearance. The number of speakers is dwindling, scattered as they are between North Ossetia, which lies in the Russian Federation, and South Ossetia, one of two Georgia’s breakaway regions.

In Areshperani, a village of about 200 in Georgia’s eastern region of Kakheti, Ossetian is still holding on and the only public school is one of two in the country where Ossetian is still taught (the other being in the village of Tsitskanaantseri which is located in the same region). A third school, in Fona, discontinued the Ossetian language classes in 2016.