Ajem-Turkic (''Türkī-yi ʿacemī''; 'Persian Turkic' or 'Persian Turkish'), also known as Middle Azeri, is used to refer to the

Turkic Turkic may refer to: * anything related to the country of Turkey * Turkic languages, a language family of at least thirty-five documented languages ** Turkic alphabets (disambiguation) ** Turkish language, the most widely spoken Turkic language * ...

vernacular spoken in Iran between the 15th and 18th century. The modern

Azerbaijani language Azerbaijani () or Azeri (), also referred to as Azeri Turkic or Azeri Turkish, is a Turkic language from the Oghuz sub-branch spoken primarily by the Azerbaijani people, who live mainly in the Republic of Azerbaijan where the North Azerbaija ...

is descended from this language.

Name

The term is derived from earlier designations, such as ''lingua turcica agemica'', or ''Turc Agemi'', which was used in a grammar book composed by the French writer Capuchin Raphaël du Mans (died 1696) in 1684. Local texts simply called the language ''türkī''. During "the

Isfahan Isfahan ( fa, اصفهان, Esfahân ), from its Achaemenid empire, ancient designation ''Aspadana'' and, later, ''Spahan'' in Sassanian Empire, middle Persian, rendered in English as ''Ispahan'', is a major city in the Greater Isfahan Regio ...

phase of the Safavids", it was called ''ḳızılbaşī'' in contrast to ''rūmī'' ( Ottoman) and ''çaġatā’ī'' ( Chagatai), due to its close relation to dialects spoken by the Qizilbash.

History

Ajem-Turkic is descended from

Old Anatolian Turkish Old Anatolian Turkish (OAT, tr, Eski Anadolu Türkçesi, ''EAT'') is the stage in the history of the Turkish language spoken in Anatolia from the 11th to 15th centuries. It developed into Early Ottoman Turkish. It was written in the Arabic scr ...

, and is part of the southwestern branch of Oghuz languages. The language first appears during the 15th-century in Azerbaijan, eastern Anatolia, and Iran. It went through more development under the Turkic dynasties of the

Aq Qoyunlu The Aq Qoyunlu ( az, Ağqoyunlular , ) was a culturally Persianate,Kaushik Roy, ''Military Transition in Early Modern Asia, 1400–1750'', (Bloomsbury, 2014), 38; "Post-Mongol Persia and Iraq were ruled by two tribal confederations: Akkoyunlu (Wh ...

(1378–1503) and the

Qara Qoyunlu The Qara Qoyunlu or Kara Koyunlu ( az, Qaraqoyunlular , fa, قره قویونلو), also known as the Black Sheep Turkomans, were a culturally Persianate, Muslim Turkoman "Kara Koyunlu, also spelled Qara Qoyunlu, Turkish Karakoyunlular, Eng ...

(1374–1468), and particularly in Safavid Iran (1501–1736), whose ruling dynasty stemmed from Azerbaijan. Under them, Ajem-Turkic, alongside Persian, was used at the court and in the military, and was a ''

lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

'' from northern to southern Iran. According to Swedish Turkologist

Lars Johanson Lars Johanson (born 8 March 1936 in Köping, Sweden) is a Swedish Turcologist and linguist, an emeritus professor at the University of Mainz, and docent at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala, Sweden. He has been ...

, Ajemi Turkic was an "Azerbaijanian koiné" that functioned as ''lingua franca'' in the Caucasus region and in southeastern

Dagestan Dagestan ( ; rus, Дагеста́н, , dəɡʲɪˈstan, links=yes), officially the Republic of Dagestan (russian: Респу́блика Дагеста́н, Respúblika Dagestán, links=no), is a republic of Russia situated in the North C ...

, and was widely spoken at the court and in the army. According to É. Á. Csató et al.:É. Á. Csató, B. Isaksson, C Jahani. ''Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic'', Routledge, 2004, p. 228, .

Literature

Since its appearance, Ajem-Turkic was heavily impacted by Persian, especially in its

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

. The Persian design of merging

clause In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with ...

s which Ajem-Turkic had inherited from Old Anatolian Turkish was strengthened due to its continuous contact with Persian. Sources for the study of Ajemi-Turkic include the prose texts of Nishati (

fl. ''Floruit'' (; abbreviated fl. or occasionally flor.; from Latin for "they flourished") denotes a date or period during which a person was known to have been alive or active. In English, the unabbreviated word may also be used as a noun indicatin ...

1530–after 1557), the ''Tarih-i Hatai'' (''Tārīkh-i Khatāʾī'', 1494/95); ''Şühedaname'' (''Şühedānāme'', 1539); and ''Tezkire-i Şeyh Safi'' (''Tedhkire-i Şeykh Ṣafī'', 1542/43).

Name

History

Literature

References

Sources

Further reading