Salam – This week’s language of the week: Azerbaijani!

Azerbaijani or Azeri (azərbaycan dili) is a Turkic language belonging to the Western Oghuz subgroup of the Oghuz branch, spoken primarily by the Azerbaijanis. It has around 23 million speakers, mainly in Azerbaijan, Iran, Georgia, Russia and Turkey, and also in Northern Iraq and Northern Syria, where the language is called Iraqi and Syrian Turkmen respectively, and also in Turkmenistan.

While most of the Azerbaijani-speaking population lives in Iran, the language has no official status and no standardized written form there. As such, while the Tabriz dialect is considered the most prestigious variety in Iran, the standard written language is based on the Shirvan, more specifically the Baku dialect. Azerbaijani has official status in Republic of Azerbaijan, where it is the sole official national language, and also in Dagestan, a federal subject of Russia.

Azerbaijani is closely related to Turkish, Qashqai, Gagauz, and more distantly to Turkmen and Crimean Tatar, sharing varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with each of those languages.

History

Azerbaijani evolved from Oghuz Turkic ("Western Turkic") which spread to the Caucasus, in Eastern Europe, and northern Iran, in Western Asia, during the medieval Turkic migrations. Persian and Arabic influenced the language, but Arabic words were mainly transmitted through the intermediary of literary Persian. Azerbaijani is, perhaps after Uzbek, the Turkic language upon which Persian and other Iranian languages have exerted the strongest impact—mainly in phonology, syntax and vocabulary, less in morphology.

Azerbaijani gradually supplanted the Iranian languages in what is now northern Iran, and a variety of languages of the Caucasus and Iranian languages spoken in the Caucasus, particularly Udi and Old Azeri. By the beginning of the 16th century, it had become the dominant language of the region, and was a spoken language in the court of the Safavids and Afsharids.

Phonology

Vowels

The symmetry of the Turkic vowel system is broken by the existence of an additional front vowel ə [æ] which is lower than [e]. Standard Azerbaijani does not have long vowels except in loanwords.

	Front	Front	Back	Back
	Unrounded	Rounded	Unrounded	Rounded
High	i	y <ü>	ɯ <ı>	u
Low	e æ <ə>	œ <ö>	ɑ <a>	ɔ <o>

Vowel harmony governs the distribution of vowels within a word opposing front versus back vowels, and rounded versus unrounded ones.

In the first syllable of a word all vowels can occur. If it is a front vowel all the subsequent vowels must be also of the front type. If it is a back vowel all the other vowels must be also of the back type. Thus, all the vowels of a word belong to the same class (back or front) and the vowels of suffixes vary according to the class of vowels in the primary stem. However, a number of suffixes are invariable and are not affected by vowel harmony. The vowels e, ö and o don't occur in suffixes.

If the first vowel of a word is rounded then the following high vowels should be also rounded. But if the following vowel is low there is no harmony because of the phonological constraint that low non-initial vowels must be always unrounded.

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n
Stop	p b	t d			c <k> ɟ <g>	(k) ɡ <q>
Affricate				tʃ <ç> dʒ <c>
Fricative	f v		s z	ʃ <ş> ʒ <j>		x ɣ <ğ>	h
Approximant					j <y>
Flap			ɾ <r>

Grammar

Like all Turkic languages, Azerbaijani is a agglutinative language adding different suffixes to a primary stem to mark a number of grammatical functions. Unlike in fusional languages, each morpheme expresses only one of them and is clearly identifiable.

Azerbaijani has at least six noun cases: Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative and ablative. Other cases, like instrumental, equative and terminal, are not acknowledged by everybody. The nominative is unmarked; the other cases are marked by suffixes which are subject to vowel harmony.

Like in other Turkic languages, there is no grammatical gender.

Unlike in Turkish, the use of the copula is mandatory.

There is no definite article in Azerbaijani.

Orthography

The Azerbaijani alphabet (Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan əlifbası) of the Republic of Azerbaijan is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Azerbaijani language. This superseded previous versions based on Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.

In Iran, the Arabic script is used to write the Azeri language. While there have been a few standardization efforts, the orthography and the set of letters used differs widely among Iranian Azeri writers, with at least two major branches, the orthography used by Behzad Behzadi and the Azəri magazine, and the orthography used by the Varlıq magazine (both are quarterlies published in Tehran).

In Russia, the Cyrillic alphabet is still used.

Text sample:

(The Lord's Prayer in Azerbaijani)

Ey Atamız

Ey göylərdə olan Atamız,

Adın müqəddəs tutulsun.

Səltənətin gəlsin.

Göydə olduğu kimi,

Yerdə də Sənin iradən olsun.

Gündəlik çörəyimizi bizə bu gün ver;

Və bizə borclu olanları bağışladığımız kimi,

Bizim borclarımızı da bağışla;

Və bizi imtahana çəkmə,

Lakin bizi şərdən xilas et.

[Çünki səltənət, qüdrət və izzət

Əbədi olaraq Sənindir.]

Amin.