Azerbaijani is natively spoken by about 22 million people, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran, with smaller communities in Russia, Turkey, and Georgia. It is central to Azerbaijani cultural identity, known for its poetry, music, and traditions such as carpet weaving. Written in the Latin alphabet in Azerbaijan and the Persian script in Iran, Azerbaijani grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, vowel harmony, and agglutination, where suffixes are added to roots to modify meaning.
Stats
Language Family: Turkic
Writing System: Latin
Writing System Type: Alphabet
Writing Direction: L to R
Tones / Pitch Accent: N
Morphology: Agglutinative
Cases: 6
Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0
Number of Verb Tenses: 3
Word Order: SOV
Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 9
Number of Consonants: 25
Areas Where Spoken
Azerbaijani (official) (92.5%) (9.38 mil)
Iran (14.3%) (12.7 mil)
Resources
Books
The Essentials of Azerbaijani - Link to download PDF course
Peace Corps’ Azerbaijani Language Lessons [PDF] - Basic guide with audio
Websites
Speak Azerbaijani - Blog on learning
GLOSS - Audio and transcript (The GLOSS site is not secure and may not be accessible with a Mac.)
Azerbaijani Tales - Collection of stories