Afshar language

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Afshar
Spoken in: Afghanistan, Iran 
Region: Kabul area, Kerman area
Total speakers: 600,000?
Language family: Altaic[1] (controversial)
 Turkic
  Oghuz
   Azerbaijani
    Afshar 
Writing system: Perso-Arabic script
Language codes
ISO 639-1: az
ISO 639-2: aze
ISO 639-3: aze – Azerbaijani (generic) 

Map showing locations of Azerbaijani and related languages: North Azerbaijani (blue), South Azerbaijani (red), Salchuq (green), Qashqa'i (brown), Afshari (purple)

Afshar or Afshari, is a Turkic language spoken in parts of Afghanistan and Iran. There are some speakers in Syria and Turkey. It is considered by many to be a dialect of Azerbaijani. As is the case for many Turkic languages, dialect continua blur the lines between distinct languages and dialects.

Afshar is distinguished by a large number of loanwords from Dari and a rounding of the phoneme /a/ to /ɒ/, as occurred in Uzbek. In many cases, vowels that are rounded in Azerbaijani are not rounded in Afshar. An example of this is jiz (meaning 100), which is jyz in standard Azerbaijani.

[edit] References

  1. ^ "[1] Ethnologue"

Doerfer, Gerhard and Hesche, Wolfram (1989). Südoghusische Materialen aus Afghanistan und Iran. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ISBN 3-447-02786-X. 

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