Languages of Azerbaijan | |
---|---|
Official | Azerbaijani |
Minority | Lezgian, Talysh, Avar, Russian, Tat, Tsakhur, Khinalug, Turkish |
Foreign | English, Russian, Turkish |
Signed | Azerbaijani Sign Language |
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Azerbaijani is the sole official language of Azerbaijan and is spoken by the majority of its population. However, several minority languages also exist in the country, including Lezgian, Talysh, Avar, Russian, and Tat. Additionally, languages such as Tsakhur and Khinalug are spoken by a small percentage of the population.
The primary and official language of Azerbaijan is Azerbaijani, [1] [2] a Turkic language closely related to and partially mutually intelligible with Modern Turkish. [3] Together with Turkish, Turkmen and Gagauz, Azerbaijani is a member of Oghuz branch of southwestern group Turkic language family. [4]
According to the 2009 census of the country, Azerbaijani is spoken as a native language by 92.5% of the population, [5] whereas Russian and English play significant roles as languages of education and communication. More than half of Azerbaijani speakers are monolingual. [4] The large Armenian-speaking population of Nagorno-Karabakh is no longer under government control. Lezgian, Talysh, Avar, Georgian, Budukh, [6] Juhuri, [6] Khinalug, [6] Kryts, [6] Jek, [7] Rutul, [6] Tsakhur, [6] Tat, [6] and Udi [6] are all spoken by minorities. All these [8] (with the exception of Armenian, Lezgian, Talysh, Avar, and Georgian, which have a much larger number of speakers outside Azerbaijan, but nevertheless are steadily declining within Azerbaijan) above-mentioned languages are endangered languages which are threatened with extinction, as they are spoken by few (less than 10,000) or very few (less than 1,000) people and their usage is steadily declining with emigration and modernization.
According to 2019 research, English language proficiency in Azerbaijan was the lowest among surveyed European countries. [9]
An entire issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, edited by Jala Garibova, was devoted to the matter of languages and language choices in Azerbaijan, vol. 198 in 2009. [10]
Azerbaijan has not ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages to which it became a signatory in 1992, under the Popular Front. In 2001, the then President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev issued a statement whereby "the Republic of Azerbaijan is not in the power to guarantee the implementation of the Charter regulations until its territory occupied by the Republic of Armenia is liberated". [11]
The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or Vainakh-Daghestani, or sometimes Caspian languages, is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in diaspora populations in Western Europe and the Middle East.
Articles related to the Azerbaijan Republic include:
Lezgins or Leks are a Northeast Caucasian ethnic group native predominantly to southern Dagestan, a republic of Russia, and northeastern Azerbaijan, and speak the Lezgin language. Their social structure is firmly based on equality and deference to individuality. Lezgin society is structured around djamaat and has traditionally been egalitarian and organised around many autonomous local clans, called syhils (сихилар).
The Caucasian languages comprise a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Forced assimilation is the involuntary cultural assimilation of religious or ethnic minority groups, during which they are forced by a government to adopt the language, national identity, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, way of life, and often the religion and ideology of an established and generally larger community belonging to a dominant culture. The enforced use of a dominant language in legislation, education, literature, and worship also counts as forced assimilation. Unlike ethnic cleansing, the local population is not outright destroyed and may or may not be forced to leave a certain area. Instead, the assimilation of the population is made mandatory. This is also called mandatory assimilation by scholars who study genocide and nationalism. Mandatory assimilation has sometimes been made a policy of new or contested nations, often during or in the aftermath of a war. Some examples are both the German and French forced assimilation in the provinces Alsace and Lorraine, and some decades after the Swedish conquests of the Danish provinces Scania, Blekinge and Halland the local population was submitted to forced assimilation, or even the forced assimilation of ethnic Teochews in Bangkok by the Siam government during World War I until the 1973 uprising.
The Talysh people are an Iranian ethnic group indigenous to the Talish region shared between Azerbaijan and Iran which spans the South Caucasus and the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea. They speak the Talysh language, one of the Northwestern Iranian languages. It is spoken in the northern regions of the Iranian provinces of Gilan and Ardabil and the southern parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The areas in the Republic of Azerbaijan where Northern Talysh is spoken was historically known as Talish-i Gushtasbi. In Iran there is a Talesh County in Gilan Province.
Tat, also known as Caucasian Persian, Tat/Tati Persian, or Caucasian Tat, is a Southwestern Iranian language closely related to, but not fully mutually intelligible with Persian and spoken by the Tats in Azerbaijan and Russia. There is also an Iranian language called Judeo-Tat spoken by Mountain Jews.
Judeo-Tat or Juhuri is a traditional language of the Mountain Jews, primarily spoken in Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and Israel.
The peoples of the Caucasus, or Caucasians, are a diverse group comprising more than 50 ethnic groups throughout the Caucasus.
The Tsakhur or Saxur people are a Lezgin sub-ethnic group of northern Azerbaijan and southern Dagestan (Russia). The group numbers around 30,000 people and are called yiqy, but are generally known by the name Tsakhur, which derives from the name of a Dagestani village, where they make up the majority.
Azerbaijanis in Russia or Russian Azerbaijanis are people of Azeri descent in Russia. These may be either ethnic Azeris residents in the country or recent immigrants who profess Azeri ancestry.
Tsakhur is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the Tsakhurs in northern Azerbaijan and southwestern Dagestan (Russia). It is spoken by about 11,700 people in Azerbaijan and by about 10,600 people in Russia. The word Tsakhur derives from the name of a Dagestani village where speakers of this language make up the majority.
This article focuses on ethnic minorities in the Republic of Azerbaijan.
Khinalug (also spelled Khinalig, Khinalugi, Xinalug(h), Xinaliq or Khinalugh) is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by about 3,000 people in the villages of Khinalug and Gülüstan, Quba in the mountains of Quba Rayon, northern Azerbaijan. It forms its own independent branch within the Northeast Caucasian language family.
Ethnic groups in the Middle East, in the 'transcontinental' region which is commonly a geopolitical term designating the intercontinental region comprising West Asia without the South Caucasus, and also comprising Egypt in North Africa. The region has historically been a crossroad of different cultures and languages. Since the 1960s, the changes in political and economic factors have significantly altered the ethnic composition of groups in the region. While some ethnic groups have been present in the region for millennia, others have arrived fairly recently through immigration. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis but there are dozens of other ethnic groups that have hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of members.
The majority of the population of Iran consists of Iranic peoples. The largest groups in this category include Persians and Kurds, with smaller communities including Gilakis, Mazandaranis, Lurs, Tats, Talysh, and Baloch.
The Intercontinental Dictionary Series is a large database of topical vocabulary lists in various world languages. The general editor of the database is Bernard Comrie of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Mary Ritchie Key of the University of California, Irvine is the founding editor. The database has an especially large selection of indigenous South American languages and Northeast Caucasian languages.
Talysh assimilation is one of the propaganda narratives created by the authorities of the Azerbaijan SSR and Soviet ethnographers, alleging the alleged complete and voluntary assimilation of Talysh people into Azerbaijanis in Soviet Azerbaijan. The narrative was created to justify the assimilation policy of the leadership of the Azerbaijan SSR towards the Talysh people and was distributed through various means, including encyclopedias, maps and textbooks. A similar policy was also pursued in relation to the Tats, Georgian-Ingiloy and other peoples of the Azerbaijan SSR.