Some Svan speakers live in the Kodori Valley of the de facto independent republic of Abkhazia.

Although conditions there make it difficult to reliably establish their numbers, there are only an estimated 2,500 Svan individuals living there.

Soviet ethnologist Evdokia Kozhevnikova extensively documented the Svan language during her fieldwork in Svaneti in the 1920s and 1930s.

That is, compared to Modern Georgian, it also has /j/, /q/ and /w/, but the labiodental fricative only appears as an allophone of /w/ in the Ln dialect.

The front rounded vowels are often realized as diphthongs [we] and [wi] and are therefore sometimes not treated as separate phonemes.