First ever app using Ossetian language launched

A mobile application using the Ossetian language is now available, for the first time ever, on the App Store. It is called ‘Iron Chinyg’, which translates as ‘Ossetian Book’, and features a whole range of audio books, including a collection of 64 epic folktales called ‘Nart Sagas’, audio spectacles and poems by prominent Ossetian authors. Its users can also play a quiz called ‘Bazon-bazon’ meaning ‘Learn it, know it’.

The app is available on Android devices. Its author, a programmer Akhsar Gabarayev from North Ossetia, says he has created it to stimulate Ossetians into using their mother tongue more actively.

• The Ossetian language was put on the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger in 2009.

• 500 to 700 thousand people worldwide speak Ossetian. It is used by the Ossetians living on both sides of the Greater Caucasus Mountain Range, by ethnic Ossetians living in several Georgia regions and by descendants of the Ossetian Mohajir, the Muslim Ossetians who emigrated to Turkey in the second half of the nineteenth century.

• Apart from the Ossetian, the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger has come to contain many other Caucasus languages, including Abkhaz, Ingush and Chechen.

Find out more about Ossetian language problems in a JAMnews story here