Azerbaijani dialects
group of dialects in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani dialects reflect relatively minor language differences and are mutually intelligible. The Azerbaijani language has two distinct sublanguages: Northern and Southern. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) considers Northern and Southern Azerbaijani, as two distinct languages.
Southern Azerbaijani contains many Persian and Arabic words that are not familiar to northern speakers. This began to increase in 1828. Likewise, Northern Azerbaijani contains a significant amount of Russian loanwords, which southern speakers are not familiar with. These differences have given rise to debate over whether the two are in fact the same language, or two completely separate languages.
History
In his Seyahatnâme (travelogue), 17th-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi provided a detailed account of the Ajem-Turkic (or Azerbaijani) dialects in continuum with the Turkish dialects of the Armenian highlands: Diyarbekir, Bitlis, and few samples of Erzurum, Van, Hamadan, Mosul, and Tabriz. Evliya Çelebi specified the Tabrizi dialect as the speech of the Turkomans, Afshars, and "Gök-dolaq". Apart from formal samples, these dialects were further exemplified by his dialogue with the Safavid governors of Urmia, Tabriz, Shamakhi, and Yerevan.
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This entry incorporates text from “Azerbaijani dialects” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.