Azerbaijani alphabet

The Azerbaijani alphabet (Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan əlifbası) of the Republic of Azerbaijan is a Latin alphabet used for writing the Azerbaijani language. This superseded previous versions based on Cyrillic and Arabic scripts.

In Iran, the Arabic script is used to write the Azeri 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 (both are quarterlies published in Tehran).

In Russia, the Cyrillic alphabet is still used.

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 (New Turkish Alphabet Committee; Јени түрк əлифба комитəси) 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 (e.g. Mirza Fatali Akhundov), 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.

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