Georgian, the leading member of the northern group, is the mother tongue of about 4 million people in Georgia and in neighboring areas of Turkey and Azerbaijan in Iran. It is a modern representative of the language of the ancient Colchians, of whom the celebrated mythological figure Medea was one. A literature in Georgian goes back to the 5th cent. a.d., and the language has two alphabets of its own, one of which is still in use, although increasingly the Cyrillic alphabet is being adopted. In general, the Caucasian languages have inflection and tend to be agglutinative in that different linguistic elements, each of which exists separately and has a fixed meaning, are often joined to form one word. Phonetically, the Caucasian tongues are distinctive, combining simplicity of vowels with abundant richness of consonants. Many of the Caucasian languages are spoken by comparatively few people (that is, fewer than 100,000), and they are gradually giving ground to Russian. An exception is Georgian, which has a comparatively large number of speakers.