Literature
Azerbaijani Literature refers to the literature written in Azerbaijani, which currently is the official state language of the Republic of Azerbaijan and is spoken by about a quarter of the population of Iran. Its closest relatives are Turkish and Turkmen. Azeri is a dialect of Oghuz branch of Turkic languages, and as such, is mutually intelligible with other Oghuz dialects spoken in Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East.
It is worth noting that the Azeri Turkic language came into existence with the invasion and settlement of waves of Turkic tribes from Central Asia over several centuries. The indigenous language of the region above and below the Aras river was a mix of Iranian Tati, Taleshi, and Armenian. With the increasing dominance of Turkic rulers, the language of the region gradually was infused with Turkic, resulting in what is known in modern days as the Azeri language.
Taleshi is still a spoken language in parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
As a result of the language policy of the Soviet Union, Russian is also commonly spoken as a second language among the urbane.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Azerbaijan
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by authors of simile and
metaphor.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)