Ethnologue and Glottolog list it as a dialect of the South Azerbaijani language.

As they were embedded in a Fārsī-speaking environment, however, in many cases Fārsī became the mother tongue of the Afshārs.

Additionally, the contact between the different languages seems to have transformed the original dialect (cf.

In 2009 a linguistic comparison of different Afshār groups remains outstanding.Afshar is distinguished by many loanwords from Persian and a rounding of the phoneme /a/ to [ɒ], as occurred in Uzbek.

[6] According to Lars Johanson, emeritus professor of Turcology and linguistics at the University of Mainz, and Eva Csato, professor emeritus in Turkic languages at Uppsala University, state that the Afshar dialect as SWS; Southwestern South Oghuz group that includes the dialects of Iran (such as Qashqai, Sonqori, Aynallu, etc.)