Azerbaijani interpreters and translators

Cal Interpreting & Translations (CIT) offers Azerbaijani interpreters and translators with legal, medical and specialty experience, including criminal and civil matters, employee meetings, engineering, patent cases, labor disputes, immigration and more.

Although based in Los Angeles, CIT offers comprehensive Azerbaijani language services including interpretation, translation and transcription, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worldwide. Our interpreters and translators are native speakers who have been screened, certified, have provided credentials, field tested, and kept up to date with developments in both English and the Azerbaijani language through means such as lectures, conferences, and travel. CIT’s Azerbaijani language interpreters and translators possess in depth knowledge of the Azerbaijani language, as well as of the culture and history of the Azerbaijani people, allowing them to provide informed and complete interpretation and translation.

History of the Azerbaijani Language

Azerbaijani is the official language of Azerbaijan, spoken by approximately 9 million people, the population of the country. Additionally, about 20 million people in Iran speak Azerbaijani. Many people residing in Russia, the USA, Turkey and Western Europe speak Azerbaijani as well. Overall, approximately 30 million people worldwide speak the language.

Historically speaking, the language belongs to the Turkic group of languages, some known as agglutinative languages, where all the words in Azerbaijani are independent units. This means that the grammatical meanings and relations are built by monosemantic inflections that follow the stem and the root of a word.

The Turkish people foundationally make up the Azerbaijani people and appeared in the area now known as Azerbaijan in the early first millennium as the language is presumed to be over 1300 years old. The transformation from Turkish origin to the level of communication known as Azerbaijani took around 800 years. The preservance of the language is credited to the Turkish people’s contribution to the economy, politics and culture. Azerbaijani was known as the literary language of Asia Minor.

The vocabulary of Azerbaijani in the first period of its establishment is flooded with Arabic and Persian words. Just as so, there are many word combinations in Azerbaijani that are seen in Arabic and Persian. In the second period of its establishment, there are many changes to it’s phonetics. There were many changes in the grammar as well, particularly changes in the future tense.

There were two periods that break down the composition of the Azerbaijani languages. The first period included the formation and flourishing of the literary language (between the 13^th and 18^th centuries). The second period includes the nationalization and establishment as a national language along with the present stage of the language. The state leader, Heydar Aliyev, played a big role in making the Azerbaijani language what it is today as he had a strong understanding of the literal language.

There were three trends in the establishment of the Azerbaijani language in the 20^th century. The first was to make the literary language closer to the colloquial language. The second was to establish the literary language as the older Azerbaijani language and the language of the Osmanli Turks. The third trend was to make the language understandable by everyone and not influenced by any dialects. North and South Azerbaijan are influenced by different languages, as South Azerbaijan is heavily influenced by Persian. In the early 19^th century, the war between Iran and Russia divided Azerbaijan into two parts.

Grammar of the Azerbaijani Language

There are four main dialects of the Azerbaijani language: eastern (featuring the Baku, Quba, Shamakhi, Lenkeran and Migham dialects), the western (featuring the Ganja, Qazakh, Karabakh and Ayrym dialects), the northern (featuring Sheki and Zagatala-Qakh dialects) and lastly, the southern (featuring the Nikhichevan and Ordubad dialects.)

In the Azerbaijani language, there are 15 vowel and 25 consonant phenomes, displayed by the 32 letters of the Azerbaijani alphabet. 9 of the vowels are short while the remaining are long. Most of the long vowels are found in loan words, or words from other languages that have been adopted by Azerbaijani. The accents of words typically falls on the last syllable. There are six cases: nominative, possessive, dative, accusative, ablative and prepositional. Verbs have five tenses (the past indefinite tense, past declarative tense, present tense, future suppositional tense, future complete tense) and there are 6 forms of mood (order, wish, condition, necessity, importance, predicate). Depending on the relationship between the subject, object and/or predicate, there are five grammatical voices as well, including active, passive, reflexive, causative and interaction. The subject is used at the beginning of the sentence while the predicate is at the end.