Linguistic Affiliation
Azari is believed to be a part of the dialect continuum of Northwest Iranian languages. As such, its ancestor would be close to the earliest attested Northwest Iranian languages, Median. As the Northwestern and Southwestern Iranian languages had not yet developed very far apart by the first millennium AD, Azari would also still have been very similar to classical Middle Persian.
Azari was spoken in most of Azarbaijan at least up to the 17th century, with the number of speakers decreasing since the 11th century due to the Turkification of the area. According to some accounts, it may have survived for several centuries after that up to the 16th or 17th century. Today, Iranian dialects are still spoken in several linguistic enclaves within Azarbaijan. While some scholars believe that these dialects form a direct continuation of the ancient Azari languages, others have argued that they are likely to be a later import through migration from other parts of Iran, and that the original Azari dialects became extinct.
The name "Azari" is derived from the old Iranian name for the region of Azarbaijan. The same name for the region, in a Turkified form, was later adopted also to designate the modern Turkic language "Azeri".
According to Vladimir Minorsky, around the 9th-10th century::
| “ | "The original sedentary population of Azarbayjan consisted of a mass of peasants and at the time of the Arab conquest was compromised under the semi-contemptuous term of Uluj("non-Arab")-somewhat similar to the raya(*ri’aya) of the Ottoman empire. The only arms of this peaceful rustic population were slings, see Tabari, II, 1379-89. They spoke a number of dialects (Adhari, Talishi) of which even now there remains some islets surviving amidst the Turkish speaking population. It was this basic population on which Babak leaned in his revolt against the caliphate. | ” |
Clifford Edmund Bosworth says:
| “ | " We need not take seriously Moqaddasī’s assertion that Azerbaijan had seventy languages, a state of affairs more correctly applicable to the Caucasus region to the north; but the basically Iranian population spoke an aberrant, dialectical form of Persian (called by Masʿūdī al-āḏarīya) as well as standard Persian, and the geographers state that the former was difficult to understand | ” |
Professor Igrar Aliyev states that:
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1. In the writing of medieval Arab historians (Ibn Hawqal, Muqqaddesi..), the people of Azarbaijan spoke Azari. 2. This Azari was without doubt an Iranian language because it is also contrasted with Dari but it is also mentioned as Persian. It was not the same as the languages of the Caucasus mentioned by Arab historians. 3. Azari is not exactly Dari (name used for the Khorasanian Persian which is the Modern Persian language). From the research conducted by researchers upon this language, it appears that this language is part of the NW Iranian languages and was close to Talyshi language. Talyshi language has kept some of the characteristics of the Median language. |
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Aliyev also mentions that the medieval Muslim historians like Baladhuri, Masudi, Ibn Hawqal and Yaqut have mentioned this language by name. Medieval historians and scholars also record that the language of the region of Azarbaijan, as well as its people there, as Iranians who spoke Iranian languages. Among these writes are Istakhri, Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim, Hamza Isfahani, Ibn Hawqal, Baladhuri, Muqaddasi, Yaghubi, Hamdollah Mostowfi, and Khwarazmi.
According to Gilbert Lazard:
| “ | Azarbaijan was the domain of Adhari, an important Iranian dialect which Masudi mentions together with Dari and Pahlavi. | ” |
According to Professor. Richard Frye: Azari was a major Iranian language and the original language of Azerbaijan region and Azari gradually lost its stature as the prevalent language by the end of the 14th century.
Read more about this topic: Old Azari Language
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