WIKITONGUES: Alana speaking Ossetian

This video is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial 4. 0 International license. To download a copy, please contact This video was recorded by Elise Lieberman in Moscow, Russia, where she was visiting and where Alana lives and works. Ossetian is spoken by as many as 570, 000 people, primarily in the Russian Republic of North OssetiaAlania and the partiallyrecognized state of South Ossetia. It is also spoken in parts of Greece and Turkey. An Iranian member of the IndoEuropean family of languages, Ossetian shares much genealogy with Kurdish, as well as the Yaghnobi language of Tajikistan. A written language since at least the 12th century CE, Ossetian was originally written with the Greek alphabet. Today, Cyrillic is more widely used. Alana speaks two dialects of Ossetian: Iron and Digorsky (Digor), the language of Northern OssetiaAlania.