term of Persian for the state language of the Persia, which was renamed to "Iran" in 1934 during the heat of the Nazi wave in the 20th century. Since Iran is a multi-ethnic political entity, the Iranian language is a gross misnomer, as it may refer to Arabic, Azeri, Armenian, Kurdish etc languages, while the Persian has a 2 millennia pedigree and can't be confused. Non-authors' clarifications and comments are in shaded boxes.

Ossetians are a unique group in the Caucasus, in that they are the only ethnic group found on both the north and south slopes of the Caucasus, and moreover they speak a patently non-Indo European agglutinative language laced, in contrast to their Caucasian-speaking neighbors, with reportedly 20% Persian lexical admixture. The analysis for mtDNA HV1 sequences,a Russian-made exoethnonym composed during Russian expansion into the Caucasus in the 18th-19th centuries, when some other Caucasian peoples also received various Russian monikers, like Vainakhs became "Chechens". Within the last 250-300 years, Digorians switched to the local dominant Ironian language.

mtDNA

A fertilized egg contains an exact copy of the mother's mtDNA and a mixture of the father and mother's nuclear DNA, but none of the father's mtDNA. The result is that mtDNA is passed on only along the maternal line. This means that all of the mtDNA in the cells of a person's body are copies of their mother's mtDNA, and all of the mother's mtDNA is a copy of her mother's, and so on. No matter how far back you go, mtDNA is always inherited only from