Zarina speaking Kudarsky (Kudar), language of Southern Ossetia

This video was recorded by Elise Lieberman in Moscow, Russia, where she was visiting and where Zarina lives and works. Kudarsky, also known as Kudar, is a variety of the Ossetian language, which is spoken by as many as 570,000 people, primarily in the Russian Republic of North Ossetia-Alania and the partially-recognized state of South Ossetia. It is also spoken in parts of Greece and Turkey. An Iranian member of the Indo-European 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.