Boundaries and Belonging in the Greek Community of Georgia

Georgia’s Greek minority defies conventional accounts of how language relates to national and religious identification. With two heritage languages, ‘Turkish’ Urum and Pontic ‘Greek’, its members are recognised as Greeks in Georgia but not always in Greece. Carefully following interviewees as they navigate intricate constellations of belonging amid the tidemarks of the Soviet past, this book offers new insights into conversational sense-making and explores the (un)making of boundaries as a complex, dynamic and context-dependent process. Concha Maria Höfler’s sensitive analysis will be equally valuable to linguistic ethnographers, border scholars and to anyone studying nationalism and identification in the post-Soviet space and beyond.