New campaign protects Georgian language from misuse

Georgia is embracing a new campaign to encourage people to protect the Georgian language and abstain from using hybrid and loan words.

On February 21, Mother Language Day, students of Tbilisi school-based civic clubs initiated a campaign to protect Georgian language from misuse.

The rules are simple: a campaign participant writes the correct Georgian equivalent word to a widely used everyday hybrid/loan word  on their right hand and crosses out the corresponding foreign word, which is sometimes used in Georgian conversation or in writing by violating grammar rules.

Then campaign participant takes a picture, upload it to social media and challenge other people to join the campaign.

"The Georgian language is a very rich language and we have many words to express any idea so we don’t really need to use foreign words,” one of the campaign participants said.

Action was initiated by students of school-based civic clubs established within the framework of the Future Generation Program, which is implemented by PH International and supported by USAID.