Bezhta’s neighboring language to the south is Georgian, and this situation must go back a long time: The Greek geographer Strabo, writing around the year zero, places a people he calls didoi beyond the Georgians, and the word may well be the same as the Georgian word dido ‘Tsez, Tsezic’. We assume that contact therefore goes back at least to the year zero – it might possibly be even older – and has continued virtually up to the present day. (The establishment of an international border between the Russian Federation and Georgia means that for the past couple of decades there has been virtually no direct contact between speakers of Bezhta and of Georgian, other than in the case of those Bezhta who live in Georgia.)