The Mystery Of Abkhaz

Just last night I met a native speaker of Abkhaz, and I chatted with him about it some, because I'm not very familiar with languages from the Caucasus. When I heard where Abkhazia was exactly (I did have some idea) I figured it was most likely a Caucasian language. He told me that it was in fact Indo-European. Considering he knew such designations, I figured he was at least versed in basic linguistics. I asked if it was a Slavic language or if it was Indo-Iranian, but he insisted that it was in fact Scythian, which he did not seem to know is a sub-branch of Indo-Iranian. He said that one of the closest languages related to it was Ossetic, which is a Scythian language.. I asked him if they wrote in a variant of Cyrillic and he said that they have a system, but since 1991 are trying to switch to Latin, because it better suits the language.

Now, most of my information comes from wikipedia and a few other sources, but it seems first off, that while there is a modified Cyrillic alphabet for Abkhaz, no Latin script seems to be in notable use. As for whether Latin is better suited for the language, there are so many consonants that there would need to be extra characters created there as well. Perhaps it is better suited as it will further distance itself from Russia, as they did with the elimination of the Georgian script years ago. Now, on top of that Abkhaz is not related to Ossetic, and it is not a Scythian language, rather it is a Caucasian language relatively close to Ubykh. So, I am now stuck with a mystery: was he misinformed about his language, did he misinform me intentionally, or is there something else even going on? I can only assume there is some debate somewhere, ideological or otherwise, that has prompted him to produce such answers.