Azerbaijani

Azerbaijani, referred to as Azerbaijani Turkish or Azeri language in other words, is the native language of the Azerbaijani people, who are a part of Turkic public and whose language is a part of the Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family. Azerbaijani, which is predominantly spoken in Iran and Azerbaijan, is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan. It is also one of the official languages of Dagestan, an autonomous republic of Russia.

The Azerbaijani people named themselves as the Turkic and their native language as Turkish until 1936. They began to name themselves as the Azerbaijani people and their language as Azerbaijani from this date forward. Azerbaijan declared its official language as Turkish in its constitution in 1992-1995 following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, the language was admitted as Azerbaijani later on.

What are the differences in the way Azerbaijani is spoken?

Azerbaijani has two different styles as the Southern Azerbaijani spoken in Iran and the Northern Azerbaijani spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan. These two language styles have differences in terms of phonetics, morphology, syntax, vocabulary and origins of the words adapted from other languages.

Azerbaijani has similarities with other Oghuz branch languages such as Turkish, Qashqai language, Turkmen and Gagauzian along with Crimean Tatar language, which is a Kipchak language that is affected by these languages. Azerbaijani is a language that is spoken by 9,600,000 people in Azerbaijan, and it is spoken by a number of people between 12 and 18 million people in Iran. The dialect of the Iraqi Turkmen is also known as a dialect of Azerbaijani. Azerbaijan started to use Latin alphabet, which was adapted to Azerbaijani, again as of 1991. In Turkey, this language is spoken especially in provinces such as Ardahan, Kars and Iğdır.

Similarities between Azerbaijani and Turkish

There is a high connection between Azerbaijani and Turkish in terms of intelligibility. There is not much difference, except for some vocal differences in some texts, even only in words and suffixes. However, important misunderstandings are often met because of the words having completely different meanings but existing in both languages.

For instance, in Azerbaijani language, “falling” means “descending”, while in Turkish it does not have such a meaning. ‘Our plane is falling’ means ‘our plane lands’ in Azerbaijani while a Turkic person, who is not familiar with Azerbaijani, may think that the plane is falling in real terms when they hear this sentence. The words such as worship/find, feel horny/get lost, mucus/bone and ass/foot are the first ones to pop into the mind among hundreds of examples. The words, which may be stated as obscene in Turkish (the latter), such as brothel/factory, sex/workshop or plant, pimp/big or huge or oaf, and dick/weapon are the subjects of humor from time to time.

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