Getting to know Azerbaijani Turkish language

Azerbaijani Turkish language (Azerbaijani Turkish: Azərbaycan türkcəsi or Azərbaycan dili) is the spoken language of people in the Azerbaijan region of Iran and other Azeri regions of Iran and the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani Turkish as a spoken language is also common in the eastern regions of Türkiye and southern Georgia and Dagestan. In recent decades, many Azerbaijanis have migrated to the big cities of Russia, Europe, America and Canada and form significant communities in these countries.

Azerbaijani Turkish is a sub-branch of Turkish languages ​​and the language of most Turkic regions of Iran, including Azerbaijan.

There is no consensus about the number of Azerbaijani Turkish speakers and the estimates are different. The main reason for this difference is the non-presentation of official statistics by the Iranian government. The number of speakers of the language in the Republic of Azerbaijan is more than 7 million people (CIA booklet) and other sources also mention more or less such a number.

In the 19th century, people raised the issue of changing the Azar alphabet. Mirza Fathali Akhundzadeh (1878) and Jalil Mohammad Qolizadeh were among these people. Of course, this was strongly opposed by another group, including clerics. This issue was also raised during the very short period of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1919). After the victory of the Bolsheviks, several newspapers were printed in the Latin script in Baku, but the Arabic script was still used. In 1924, Nariman Narimanov, the leader of the Bolsheviks of Azerbaijan, was able to get the law of using Latin in government affairs approved by the Parliament of the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Change to the Latin alphabet (1926) In 1926, the first Turkic conference was held in Baku. The gathered decided to declare the Latin script as the script used by all Azeri speakers in the world. Two years later, under the leadership of "Kemal Pasha" (Atatürk), calligraphy reform was implemented in Türkiye and the Latin alphabet replaced the Ottoman (Arabic) alphabet. In the same year, a committee named "Yeni Elifba" (New Alphabet) in Moscow compiled a uniform alphabet to be used in all Turkic-speaking republics of the Soviet Union (Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan). This alphabet was used for more than ten years.

In 1939, the Latin alphabet was abandoned and the Russian Cyrillic script was replaced by the Latin script. At the same time, Russian language teaching was declared compulsory in all schools. One of the reasons for changing the line again in this period and the lack of coordination between common language groups in compiling the new alphabet can be due to the policy of dividing nations and preventing nationalist sentiments. Stalin's fear of the unity and power of the Muslims, most of whom were Turkish speakers, suppressed non-Russian languages ​​in the geographical boundaries of the Soviet Union by replacing the Russian language with great intensity, which continued until the fall of this union in 1991. But some of these republics returned their alphabet to Latin after their independence in 1991. Of course, the ancient script of the Turks was the runic script, which was forgotten after accepting Islam and converting the common script to Arabic, which is much easier than the runic script. Latin script are not available. Azerbaijani Latin script is slightly different from Istanbul Turkish Latin script with some prepositions (x, q, ə)) i.e. (ا, ق, خ). In Iran, the Azerbaijani language is written with the Arabic alphabet. Currently, the Turkish languages ​​that use the Latin alphabet are Azerbaijani Turkish (Republic of Azerbaijan), Turkish Turkish, Uzbek, Uyghur (Bakhsa).