Background

Language Family: Turkic / Common Turkic / Oghuz / Western Oghuz / Azerbaijani

Azerbaijani is spoken in Iran and Azerbaijan, a country located between Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

Phonology

Consonants

Although some sources argue for /c/ and /k/ as distinct phonemes, they do not have overlapping distributions, making it plausible that [c] only manifests as a fronted allophone of /k/. I have included /c/ in my consonant chart below, but do not include it by default in the ruleset.
- Southern dialects only retain /c/ and /k/ in loanwords (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 209).
- In words where northern dialects retain /c/, southern dialect speakers tend to realize the consonant as /ts/ or /tʃ/ (ibid.).
Salimi (1976) argues for /ts/ and /dz/ only existing as fronted allophones of their postalveolar counterparts (p. 72).
Fraenkel (1962) posits /ʔ/ as existing as a non-phonemic “juncture feature” that sometimes marks syllable boundaries or appears in Arabic loans (p. 451).
/ts/ and /dz/ are likely to be peripheral phonemes, as they are significantly less common than any other phonemes in the Crúbadán corpus.

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops	p b	t d		c ɟ	k ɡ
Affricates		ts dz	tʃ dʒ
Fricatives	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ	h
Nasals	m	n
Taps		ɾ
Approximants		l		j
Note: Phonemes to the left of each cell are voiceless and phonemes to the right of each cell are voiced.

Vowels

Vowel length is non-contrastive (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 210).
- Salimi (1976) argues for the existence of underlying long vowels (pp. 89-91), but he describes them as being rather marginal, so I have opted to prefer Mokari’s analysis.
Vowels undergo vowel harmony based on frontness and rounding (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 210–11).

	Front	Back
High	i y	ɯ u
Mid	e œ	o
Low	æ	ɑ
Note: Phonemes to the left of each cell are unrounded and phonemes to the right of each cell are rounded.

Alphabet

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
a	/ɑ/
b	/b/
c	/dʒ/
ç	/tʃ/
d	/d/
e	/e/
ə	/æ/
f	/f/
g	/ɟ/
ğ	/ɣ/
h	/h/
x	/x/
ı	/ɯ/
i	/i/
j	/ʒ/
k	/c/; /k/	non-overlapping distribution
q	/ɡ/
l	/l/
m	/m/
n	/n/
o	/o/
ö	/œ/
p	/p/
r	/ɾ/
s	/s/
ş	/ʃ/
t	/t/
u	/u/
ü	/y/
v	/v/
y	/j/
z	/z/

Syllable Structure

Azerbaijani has a (C)V(C) syllable structure (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 211).

Lenition Rules

Word-final affricates tend to weaken: the alveolar affricates go to [ʃ], and /tʃ/ debuccalizes to [h] (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 209).
Stem-final /tʃ/ approximantizes to [j] before vowel-initial suffixes (ibid.).
- Stem-final /x/ voices to [ɣ] in the same circumstances (ibid.).
Postvocalic /v/ sometimes approximantizes to [w] (Salimi 1976, 70).
- Voiced dorsal stops similarly approximantize to [w] after round vowels (ibid.).
/ɾ/ sometimes spirantizes initially or before non-low vowels (ibid.).
Word-final /ɡ/ spirantizes, and sometimes also devoices, depending on dialect (Salimi 1976, 83).
/c/ spirantizes to [ç] in preconsonantal and word-final contexts (Salimi 1976, 85).
Stops occasionally spirantize intervocalically (Fraenkel 1962, 447–48).
/n/ sometimes reduces to a nasalization of its preceding vowel, most commonly when word-final or preceding a continuant (Fraenkel 1962, 449).

Misc. Rules

Voiceless stops are realized with aspiration (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 209).
Velar stops palatalize when adjacent to a front vowel (ibid.).
Stops devoice word-finally (Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand and Werner, Stefan 2017, 209); Fraenkel (1962) argues that stops devoice word-initially as well (pp. 447-448).
/l/ palatalizes slightly near front vowels, and velarizes slightly near back vowels (Salimi 1976, 70).
Word-finally or preconsonantally, /ɾ/ tends to be realized as [ʐ] (Salimi 1976, 70–71).
Many speakers realize /ʒ/ as [dʒ] [Fraenkel (1962), p. 450].

References

Fraenkel, Gerd. 1962. “A Generative Grammar of Azerbaijani.” PhD thesis, Indiana University.

Mokari, Payam Ghaffarvand, and Werner, Stefan. 2017. “Illustrations of the Ipa: Azerbaijani.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 207–12.

Salimi, Hosseingholi. 1976. “A Generative Phonology of Azerbaijani.” PhD thesis, University of Florida.

Azerbaijani

Bill Mizgerd