Laze

Laz (autonymously Lazuri) is a Kartvelian language closely related to Mingrelian, spoken by around 150,000 people primarily on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey (Rize and Artvin provinces) and small populations in Adjara, Georgia. The Laz are a Christian-origin people who converted to Islam during the Ottoman period and now identify primarily as Sunni Muslim Turks of Caucasian heritage. Linguistically, Laz is part of the Zan branch of Kartvelian alongside Mingrelian (xmf), with which it forms a dialect continuum across the Turkish-Georgian border. The Laz language has no official status in Turkey, where it has been suppressed under the linguistic homogenization policies of the Turkish Republic since 1923, and is now severely endangered as younger generations speak only Turkish. The Laz Institute (Laz Enstitüsü) established in 2013 is the main contemporary revitalization effort.