Undefined
July 11, 2014

Almost 50 different languages are native to the Caucasus region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

July 4, 2014

IBT has added the Adyghe translation of the Old Testament book of Proverbs to our long list of publications. The Adyghe language is spoken in the northwestern part of the Caucasus area of Russia by about 117,000 people, who are closely related to the Kabardian and Cherkess peoples and together with them make up the Circassian ethnic group.

July 1, 2014

The book of Proverbs has recently been audio recorded by IBT in the endangered Bezhta and Tsakhur languages. Bezhta is spoken by about 6,000 people in Dagestan and does not have an official orthography, while Tsakhur has about 23,000 speakers in Dagestan and Azerbaijan and is written with both Cyrillic and Roman orthographies. While both languages have a rich oral tradition, neither yet has a tradition of written literature.

March 6, 2014

IBT has recently published the Four Gospels in the Lezgi language. There are over 400,000 Lezgi speakers in the Russian Federation, most of whom live in south Dagestan near the border with Azerbaijan. More than 350,000 Lezgis also live in Azerbaijan, as well as in Turkey, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

The Institute for Bible Translation has published the book "Heroic Legends of the Shors: Qara Qaan, Qara Sabak" with a parallel translation in Russian. The book was written by the philological editor of the Shor Bible translation project L. N. Arbachakova. The poetic works found in this book are examples of oral epic art of the Shors, an indigenous minority people group, residing in southern Kemerovskaya Oblast. In 2010, they numbered 12,888 people, according to the census. The Shor language belongs to the Khakas sub-group of the Uyghur-Oghuz group of Turkic languages. Today the vibrant story-telling culture of the Sayan-Altai people has practically disappeared, but L. Arbachakova has been able to make unique recordings of heroic legends performed by the last representative of the Lower Mrassu story-telling school V. E. Tannagashev (1932-2007).