Tarlan speaking Azeri

This video was recorded by Madeleine Koerner at the tourism office in Zaqatala, Azerbaijan and features native speaker Tarlan Ahmedov. North Azerbaijani was spoken by roughly 6,100,000 as of a 2007 census. Not to be confused with South Azerbaijani, the two languages have enough phonological, lexical, and syntactic differences to be considered discrete languages, challenging their mutual intelligibility. The two are sometimes referred to collectively as Azeri Turkic, part of the Turkic branch of the Altaic language family. North Azerbaijani has official status in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, Russia. North Azerbaijani, like others in the Turkic family, is one of the languages of the world that features vowel harmony, where vowels within words assimilate to, or harmonize with, each other. Azerbaijani vowels harmonize according to roundedness (rounded/unrounded) and backness (front/back). North Azerbaijani's word order is SOV, it possesses a case-marking system with six cases, and contains no articles. The language arises from the Turkic migrations in medieval times across the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and northern Iran, where it drew great influence from Persian and Arabic. -- Raanan Robertson http://www.Wikitongues.org