The Svans are an ethnic subgroup of the Georgians indigenous to Svaneti, a region in northwest Georgia. They speak the Svan language and are mostly bilingual also in Georgian. Both these languages belong to the Kartvelian languages. In the pre-1930 Soviet census, the Svans were categorized as a separate ethnic group. The self-designation of the Svan is Mushwan, which is probably reflected in the ethnonym Misimian of the Classical authors.