Afshar language

Afshar
Spoken in	Turkey Syria Iran Afghanistan
Region	Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Khorasan, Iran, Kerman area, Kabul area.
Native speakers	about 600,000  (date missing)
Language family	Turkic Oghuz South Afshar
Writing system	Perso-Arabic script, Latin script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	azb – (South Azeri)

Afshar or Afshari, is a Turkic language spoken in Turkey, Syria, parts of Afghanistan and Iran. It is considered by many to be a dialect of Turkish. 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 Persian 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.

References

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

See also

• Afshar
• Afshar tribe
• Avshar Turkmen
• Afsharid dynasty