The Azerbaijani alphabet has three versions. North Azerbaijani of the Republic of Azerbaijan is a modified Latin alphabet used for writing the Azerbaijani language. This superseded previous versions based on Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic scripts after the fall of Soviet Union and independence of Azerbaijan. In Iran, where Azerbaijanis make up the second largest ethnic group after Persians, a modified Persian script is widely used to write the South Azerbaijani language. While there have been a few standardization efforts, the orthography and the set of letters used differs widely among Iranian Azeri writers, with at least two major branches, the orthography used by Behzad Behzadi and the Azari magazine, and the orthography used by the Varliq magazine. In Russia, the Cyrillic alphabet is still used to write in Azerbaijani language.
History and development
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 Azeri. In 1929, a Latin alphabet was created by Soviet Union sponsored Yeni türk əlifba komitəsi in Baku which hoped that the new alphabet would divide the Azerbaijanis in the USSR from those living in Iran. 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 Azeri intellectuals, had previously been rejected by the Azeri religious establishment on the grounds that Arabic script, the language of the Koran, was "holy and should not be tampered with" there was some historical basis for the reform which received overwhelming support at the First Turcological Congress in Baku during 1926 where the reform was voted for 101 to 7. The Azeri poet Samad Vurgun declared "Azerbaijani people are proud of being the first among Oriental nations that buried the Arabic alphabet and adopted the Latin alphabet. This event is written in golden letters of our history" 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, during the Red terror campaign, Joseph Stalin ordered that the Azeri script used in the USSR again be changed, this time to the Cyrillic script in order to sever the soviet Azerbaijanis ties with the people in the Republic of Turkey. At the same time that the leaders of the Soviet Union were attempting to isolate the Soviet population of Azeri speakers from the neighboring populations in Persia and Turkey, the Persian government of the Azeri speaking Qajar dynasty was overthrown by Reza Shah who quickly established the Pahlavi dynasty and banned the publication of texts in Azeri. 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.
The Azerbaijani alphabet is the same as the Turkish alphabet, except forӘə, Xx, and Qq, the letters for sounds which do not exist as separate phonemes in Turkish. When compared to the historic Latin alphabet: Ğğ has replaced the historic Ƣƣ ; the undotted Iı has replaced the historic I with half-oval Ьь; the dotted İi has replaced the historic soft-dotted Ii; Jj has replaced the historic Жж; Öö has replaced the historic Ɵɵ; Üü has replaced the historic Үү; and Yy has replaced the historic Jј.
Schwa (Ə)
When the new Latin script was introduced on December 25, 1991, A-umlaut was selected to represent the sound /æ/. However, on May 16, 1992, it was replaced by the grapheme schwa, used previously. Although use of Ä ä 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 Azeri's most common vowel, in both post-Arabic alphabets of Azerbaijan.
Persian script
Here is the modified Perso-Arabic script that is currently used for Azeri language in Iran. آ، ب ، ج ، چ ، د ، اَ-ه ، اِ-ائ ، ف ، گ ، ق ، غ ، ح-ه ، خ ، اي ، ایٛ ، ژ ، ک ، ل ، م ، ن ، اوْ ، اؤ ، پ ، ر ، س-ث-ص ، ش ، ت-ط ، اۇ ، اۆ ، و ، ی ، ز-ذ-ظ-ض.
Comparison of Azerbaijani alphabets
This section contains the national anthem of Azerbaijan, in the current Latin, Cyrillic, Jaꞑalif, and Perso-Arabic alphabets.
Transliteration
The Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets each have a different sequence of letters. The table below is ordered according to the latest Latin alphabet: 1 – in the beginning of a word and after vowels The Azeri Perso-Arabic alphabet also contains the letter ڴ. Originally ڴ stood for the sound , which then merged with . Initial versions of the Azeri Latin alphabet contained the letter Ꞑꞑ, which was dropped in 1938. The letter Цц, intended for the sound in loanwords, was used in Azerbaijani Cyrillic until 1951. In Azerbaijani, the sound generally becomes .
