Interesting facts about the language

Azerbaijani is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan. There, the language is also called Azerbaijani Turkic. Many speakers of Azerbaijani live in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Small groups of people who state Azerbaijani as their native language live in Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Syria.

Azerbaijani belongs to the Turkic language family. Along with Turkish and Uzbek, Azerbaijani is one of the largest languages in this language family. A characteristic of Turkic languages is their agglutinative language structure. To learn and understand Azerbaijani, Turkish, or Uzbek, for example, you first need to understand what an agglutinative language is. The word agglutinate comes from Latin and means to clump or stick together. The central principle of this type of language structure is the suffix. A suffix is a suffix added to the end of a word, thus changing or expanding the meaning of the word. You can add several suffixes to a word in succession, thus further specifying its meaning. Thus, the more information the words contain, the longer they become. There are many different types of suffixes that can be added to a word.

As a learner, you will be helped by the fact that Azerbaijani has been written using the Turkish alphabet in Latin letters since 1992. Previously, the Arabic alphabet was used first, followed by Cyrillic letters.