Azerbaijani alphabet
North Azerbaijani, the official language of Republic of Azerbaijan, is written in a modified Latin alphabet.
After the fall of Soviet Union this superseded previous versions based on Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.
From the nineteenth century there were efforts by some intellectuals like Mirza Fatali Akhundov and Mammad agha Shahtakhtinski to replace the Arabic script and create a Latin alphabet for Azerbaijani.
[4] An additional reason for the Soviet regime's encouragement of a non-Arabic script was that they hoped the transition would work towards secularizing Azerbaijan's Muslim culture and since language script reform, proposed as early as the 19th century by Azerbaijani intellectuals (e.g. Mirza Fatali Akhundov), had previously been rejected by the Azerbaijani religious establishment on the grounds that Arabic script, the language of the Koran, was "holy and should not be tampered with.
This event is written in golden letters of our history"[7] As a result, in the Soviet Union in 1926 the Uniform Turkic Alphabet was introduced to replace the varieties of the Arabic script in use at the time.
In 1939 Joseph Stalin ordered that the Azerbaijani Latin script used in the USSR again be changed, this time to the Cyrillic script[10] in order to sever the Soviet Azerbaijani Turks' ties with the Turkish people in the Republic of Turkey.
[4] When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Azerbaijan gained its independence, one of the first laws passed in the new Parliament was the adoption of a new Latin-script alphabet.
Consequently, Jj, Yy, and some other several letters (Cc, Çç) have also changed their phonetic values in comparison with the historical alphabet.
In translingual contexts (e.g. mathematics), the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet are named in Azerbaijani in the following way:[13] a, be, ce (se),[14][15] de, e, ef, qe, aş (haş),[15] i, yot, ka, el, em, en, o, pe, ku, er, es, te, u, ve, dubl-ve, iks, iqrek, zet.
Although use of Ä ä (also used in Tatar, Turkmen, and Gagauz) seems to be a simpler alternative as the schwa is absent in most character sets, particularly Turkish encoding, it was reintroduced; the schwa had existed continuously from 1929 to 1991 to represent Azerbaijani's most common vowel, in both post-Arabic alphabets (Latin and Cyrillic) of Azerbaijan.
The development of a modern standardized Azerbaijani Arabic alphabet has been an ongoing project in Iran in the past several decades.
Azerbaijani-speaking scholars and literarians showed great interest in involvement in such ventures and in working towards the development of a standard writing system.
These effort culminated in language seminars being held in Tehran, chaired by the founder of Varlıq, Javad Heyat in 2001 where a document outlining the standard orthography and writing conventions were published for the public.
[1] This standard of writing is today canonized by the official Persian–Azerbaijani Turkic dictionary in Iran titled "lugat name-ye Turki-ye Azarbayjani".
However, due to a failure by the Iranian government to implement the constitutionally-required formal education of Azerbaijani language in the Iranian education system, and due to the spread of use of computers and smartphones, and the ease of using Latin alphabet on these platforms, the Latin alternative from Iran's northern neighbor has been gaining popularity in the last two decades.
Diacritics (including hamza) in combination with the letters alef (ا), vav (و) or ye (ی) are used in order to mark each of these vowels.
Important to note that similar to Persian alphabet, vowels in the initial position require an alef (ا) all the time—and if needed, followed by either vav (و) or ye (ی).
Below are the six vowel sounds in common with Persian, their representation in Latin and Arabic alphabets.
For E-e (ائ / ئ), the sound is shown with a hamzeh on top of a ye in almost all cases.
Other examples include تلویزیون televiziyon 'TV'), علم elm 'science', and قانع qane 'satisfied'.
Examples include تسبئح təsbeh, بئساواد besavad, پئشکش peşkəş.
The writing of the diacritic is optional and not necessary,[citation needed] and is only ever actually done in beginner language lesson books or in order to avoid confusion with a similarly written word.
In words like qızıl قیزیل 'gold', familiarity with the vocabulary helps native speakers.
[citation needed] For round vowels, O-o (اوْ / وْ), U-u (اوُ / وُ), Ö-ö (اؤ / ؤ), and Ü-ü (اوٚ / وٚ), it is recommended that the first syllable containing such vowel be marked with diacritic, while the rest can remain unmarked and solely written with a vav (و).
Highlighted columns indicate letters from Persian or Arabic that are exclusively used in loanwords, and not in native Azerbaijani words.
[1] دامجؽ Notes[1] This section contains the national anthem of Azerbaijan, in the current Latin, Cyrillic, Jaŋalif, Georgian, and Arabic alphabets.
Initial versions of the Azerbaijani Latin alphabet contained the letter Ꞑꞑ, which was dropped in 1938.
This letter no longer exists in the Azerbaijani Arabic orthographic conventions anymore either.
[1] The letter Цц, intended for the sound [ts] in loanwords, was used in Azerbaijani Cyrillic until 1951.
The apostrophe was used until 2004 in loanwords from Arabic for representing the glottal stop or vowel length.
