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Discussion

After the Russian-Caucasian war in the 19th century, a big number of North Caucasian peoples was forced to leave the Caucasus. Among them were thousand of Ossetians. This migration process is also known as muhajir movement and took place in the years of 1859-1865. Descendants of these muhajirs can be found all over the region of the former Ottoman Empire, the bulk of them is living in Turkey. The number of North Caucasians in Turkey is not known, they are estimated to be at least one million. The numbers for Anatolian Ossetians are also not clear and estimated to be approximately 20.000 (in comparison: the Ossetian population in North Ossetia-Alania is over 400.000). Nowadays, only three Ossetian villages in Turkey remain, all three of them are in the vicinity of Yozgat. The Turkish Assimilation Policy of the 1920s-1940s affected many minorities, among them the Ossetians. Thus, only a small number managed to preserve their language. The number of Anatolian Ossetic speakers is not more than 500. 

Anatolian Ossetic is no written language, therefore the diaspora has no standardised writing system. Whenever they write Ossetic, they almost exclusively use the Turkish alphabet, which does not represent all Ossetians phonemes and is thus not suitable. The lack of orthographic rules lead to a number of interesting phenomena that can be observed. Despite the grammatical and lexical differences, Anatolian and Caucasian Ossetic is still intelligible.