Zazaki biography channel
Zaza Rusadze
director, producer
Zaza Rusadze was born in Tbilisi, Georgia in 1977. In 1996 he moved to Germany and studied directing at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. 2003 Rusadze’s graduation documentary film "Bandits" was produced in collaboration with the German-French TV-Channel ARTE. "Bandits" screened at the International Film Festivals and was aired by several European and Georgian TV Broadcasters. In 2007 Rusadze founded Zazarfilm Production in Tbilisi and· has been splitting his time between Europe and Georgia since. In 2013 his feature debut A FOLD IN MY BLANKET, world-premiered at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival as the opening film of the Panorama. Aside from directing and producing, Rusadze worked as a 1st AD on international film productions and assisted film directors such as Ineke Smits, Dito Tsintsadze, Julia Loktev, Otar Iosseliani and Nana Ekvtimishvili. The documentary feature WHEN THE EARTH SEEMS TO BE LIGHT, produced by Zazarfilm received the IDFA 2015 Award for Best First Appearance at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. 2015-2017 Rusadze was a member of the selection committee of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film. In 2020, EURYDIKE (Kreidler), a video co-directed with Andreas Reihse, won the MuVi Award for the Best German Music Video at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. In 2020-21 he received a scholarship from the Tarabya Culture Academy in Istanbul. Currently, Rusadze lives in Berlin, works as a video artist for theatre stages in Hamburg and Vienna, and is about to finish writing his first fiction novel.
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Filmography
2015 WHEN THE EARTH SEEMS TO BE LIGHT - Producer
2013 A FOLD IN MY BLANKET - Director, Producer
2003 BANDITS - Director
Zaza language
Northwestern Iranian language spoken in Turkey
"Dimili" redirects here. For the village in Visakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh, India, see Dimili, Visakhapatnam district.
Zaza (endonym: Zazakî, Dimlî, Dimilkî, Kirmanckî or Kirdkî) is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken primarily in eastern Turkey by the Zazas, who are commonly considered as Kurds, and in many cases identify as such. The language is a part of the Zaza–Gorani language group of the northwestern group of the Iranian branch. The glossonym Zaza originated as a pejorative. According to Ethnologue, Zaza is spoken by around 1.48 million people, and the language is considered threatened due to a declining number of speakers, with many shifting to Turkish. Nevins, however, puts the number of Zaza speakers between two and three million.
Classification
The Zaza language is considered a branch of the Kurdic subgroup within the Northwestern Iranian languages. The varieties of Kurdic do not directly descend from any known Middle Iranian languages, such as Middle Persian or Parthian, or from Old Iranian languages, such as Avestan or Old Persian. Zaza is considered a macrolanguage, consisting of Southern and Northern Zaza.Glottolog database classifies Zazaki under the Adharic branch of Northwestern Iranian languages.
Linguistically, the classification of Zazaki as either a Kurdish dialect or a distinct language is a topic of debate among scholars. Some, such as Ludwig Paul, do not consider Zazaki and Gorani to be Kurdish dialects. According to him, they can only be classified as Kurdish dialects in a political and ethnic context, and it would be more accurate to refer to them as Kurdish languages. The differences between them arise from the Kurdish adoption of Persian lingui
Mutual intelligibility of a Kurmanji and a Zazaki dialect spoken in the province of Elazığ, Turkey
1 Introduction
Turkey is a large country with a rich history, which is reflected in the linguistic diversity among its inhabitants. Turkish is the national language and the mother tongue of approximately 66 million people in Turkey, which equals 85% of the population (Buran and Yüksel Çak 2012). However, there is also a large number of local and minority languages, including Arabic, Albanian, Armenian, Bosnian, Circassian, Georgian, Hamsyn, Judea, Kurmanji, Laz, Pomak, Romaic, Syriac, and Zazaki (Buran and Yüksel Çak 2012; Simons and Fennig 2017; Uzun 2012). These languages belong to different language families and according to Ethnologue (EGIDS) many of them have very few speakers in Turkey and the numbers of users are decreasing. Therefore, they are in danger of dying out within the near future and the need for more knowledge about their use and position in society is crucial.
The present paper focuses on the two minority languages with the largest numbers of speakers in Turkey, Kurmanji and Zazaki, and in particular, we are interested in measuring how well speakers of Kurmanji and Zazaki can understand each other’s languages. Both languages belong to the Northwestern Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. While Kurmanji is classified as a dialect of Kurdish language, the position of Zazaki has been a controversial issue for many years (see Aratemür 2011; Koç 2011). Even though Zazaki is widely accepted to be a separate Iranian language (Gippert 1996; Paul 1998; for linguistic differences between Zazaki and Kurdish dialects see Gippert 2008), some studies (e.g. Sheyholislami 2017) classify Zazaki as a dialect of Kurdish language without any linguistically acceptable arguments. The relationship between the two languages is blurred by the fact that Kurmanji has had a large impact on the Zazaki language due to the geographical closeness
Zaza Okuashvili
Georgian-British businessman
Zaza Okuashvili (Georgian: ზაზა ოქუაშვილი;, born 31 May 1963 in Tbilisi), is a UK Citizen and businessman. Founder and owner of the Omega Group of companies and the national television station, Iberia. He has the Reserve military rank of Major.
Early life
Okuashvili was born and raised in Tbilisi’s Vera district, his father an engineer and his mother a doctor. After schooling at Tbilisi Public School no. 55, he graduated from Tbilisi State Medical University in 1989 and went on to practice anaesthesia and emergency care at Tbilisi’s Republican Hospital and the Khashuri Regional Hospital.
Business life
In 1991, he founded Omega group, one of the largest employers in the country and the largest taxpayer. It comprises Omega Motors (representing BMW,Mini, Iveco, Opel, Chevrolet, Maserati and Bentley); OGT (cigarette manufacturing, developed from partnerships with Philip Morris, Rothmans and R.J.Reynolds); and Omega Tegi (printing house, in partnership with Heidelberg). To date, the group have generated revenues for the Georgian budget a little under USD 900,000,000. Okuashvili has also developed significant media enterprises. The flagship is Iberia Television, a national independent station, which first started broadcasting in 2000. Over the next three years, he founded the current affairs newspaper, Akhali Epoka; a literary periodical, Chveni Mtserloba; a news agency, Media News; and a Georgian writers union, the Omega Club. He also established a literature prize and the Iverieli annual award for journalists.
On 19 February 2004, armed and masked Special Forces units raided and occupied Iberia TV and Omega Group buildings. Iberia was forced off the air, its licence revoked, and demands were made to Okuashvili by the then presidential administration to surrender majority shareholdings in his businesses. Okuashvi