Georges Charachidzé was a French-Georgian scholar of the Caucasian cultures.
Background
Georges Charachidzé was born into the Georgian émigré community of Paris. His father David Sharashidze (French: Charachidzé) (1886 – 1935) was a journalist and a member of the Constituent Assembly of Georgia before being forced to leave his homeland following the Soviet takeover of Georgia in 1921. Georges Charachidzé grew up speaking both Georgian and French.
Career
In 1965, he accompanied Dumézil to Turkey for a field-work study of the Caucasian communities, descending from the 19th-century refugees of the Russian conquest wars in the Caucasus. While in Turkey, he assisted Dumézil in the reconstruction of the vanishing Ubykh language and in recording its last living speaker, Tevfik Esenç, who died in 1992. Charachidzé was a regular contributor to the long-running, Paris-based journal for Caucasian studies Bedi Kartlisa, founded and sponsored by the Georgian émigrés Kalistrat Salia and Nino Salia.
In 1985, Charachidzé, together with Dumézil, founded the successor journal Revue des Etudes Géorgiennes et Caucasiennes.
Charachidzé taught Georgian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales from 1965 to 1998. He served as the president of the Société de Linguistique de Paris in 1984.
Georges Charachidzé died in Paris in 2010.
Membership
Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres]
He was also a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.