Азербайджанийн мотт

During the Safavid period Azerbaijani Turkish, or, as it was also referred to at that time, Qizilbash Turkish, occupied an important place in society, and it was spoken both at court and by the common people. Although Turkish was widely spoken in Safavid Iran this fact is rarely mentioned. Usually neither Persian nor European authors mention in which language people communicated with each other. The Turkish spoken in Safavid Iran was mostly what nowadays is referred to as Azeri or Azerbaijani Turkish. However, at that time it was referred to by various other names. It would seem that the poet and miniaturist Sadeqi Afshar (1533–1610), whose mother tongue was not Azerbaijani Turkish, but Chaghatay (although he was born in Tabriz), was the first to refer to speakers of Qizilbashi (motakallemin-e Qizilbash), but he, and one century later ‘Abdol-Jamil Nasiri, were the exception to this general rule of calling the language “Turki.”1 The Portuguese called it Turquesco. Other Europeans and most Iranians called it Turkish or Turki. For the sake of simplicity and to avoid confusion we call the Turkic language used in Safavid Iran, Azerbaijani Turkish.

Another.term denoting the same language was used by Navä'l, the most prominent representative of the Chagatay literary language and its literature. He noted that the fourteenth century poet Näsimi wrote poems both in Turkmäni and Rumi, the former meaning the forerunner of modern Azeri, the latter referring to Ottoman (Köprülü 1943:130). Minorsky also refers to Azeri texts as Turcoman (Minorsky 1943:188; 1954:283). It has been noted that the term kizilbaş was also used to describe the texts with Azeri features, which is a curious example of how a language can be renamed according to the religious-political convictions of its speakers (Gandjel 1986b:124).
More recently, yet another term denoting the same language has been revived. The expression Turc Ajämi was used by a Capuchin missionary, Raphael du Mans in his Estat de la Perse en 1660 (Schefer 1890:134-5; Gandjei 1989:1; Johanson 1985:145). This term seems to be more appropriate than the confusing Turki or the term historical Azerbaijani literary language. It is appropriate because, firstly, it has not been used to describe any other written Turkic idiom, and therefore it is unambiguous. Secondly, it allows a wider geographical scope for the language in question, since its use was by no meanr limited to Azerbaijan proper as the second term would suggest. Thirdly, being derived from a seventeenth century author, it also carries an appropriate historical flavour, somewhat akin to the term Ottoman as opposed to Turkish. This immediately makes it clear that it refers to the written version of the Azeri dialect, as used in historical times only.
In what follows the term Turc Ajämi will be used to denote the direct predecessor of modern Azeri as it is represented in written documents from the beginnings.

A member of the Oghuz (south-western) group of * Turkic languages , spoken by 83% of the population of 7 million of the Republic of Azerbaijan. In Iran, it is the spoken language of the province of East Azerbaijan and most of the provinces of West Azerbaijan and Zanjan. In pre-modern works in Azeri, the language is referred to as ‘Turkish’ ( turki ). In the late 19th c., to distinguish it from Ottoman * Turkish, it was called ‘Azeri’ or ‘Azerbaijani Turkish’. In some Russian sources it was referred as the language or dialect of the Caucasian Tatars. In the mid-1930s the name was changed by the Soviet regime (the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic) to ‘Azerbaijani’, to avoid the designations ‘Turk’ and ‘Turkish’ for the people and language. The earliest Azeri texts date from the 14th c.; their language is that of contemporary Anatolian Turkish (Old Ottoman) texts. In the 15th and 16th centuries, as a result of political and cultural polarization, Azeri underwent the influence of Central Asian Turkic literary works, grammatically, lexically, and to some extent orthographically. These are the main characteristics that mark off the Azeri of this period from the unitary literary language that was by then current in the Ottoman domain.