For many who will attend COP29 and follow the process, this will be their first real encounter with Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani nation numbers 40 million—only 10 million of them live in the Republic of Azerbaijan while approximately 28 million reside in neighboring Iran. Azerbaijani is a Turkic language, very close to the languages spoken in Türkiye and Turkmenistan. In this language, the term “Azeri” is never used to identify those who speak the titular language of Azerbaijan or the people who live in the country. Despite this, many English-language commentators and media outlets still erroneously refer to the people of Azerbaijan as “Azeris” and their language as “Azeri.”
What is the source of this widespread misnomer? At first glance, it could be because the term Azerbaijani is five syllables long, and so “Azeri” is used as a shorthand. Yet, no media outlet calls the U.S. state of California “Calif.” Micronesia is also called by its full name. And don’t forget Papua New Guinea, recently mentioned by President Biden, and those countries combined from multiple regions like Bosnia and Herzegovina and Antigua and Barbuda. Other nations and languages have five syllable names, such as Indonesian and Macedonian, and the media doesn’t shorten them.
One source of the inaccuracy can be that many of the main computer programs in common usage around the world refer to the “Azeris” and the “Azeri” language. For instance, Apple products list “Azeri” as an optional language. On the other hand, Google has a language and translation option that uses the term “Azerbaijani.” Microsoft is a mixed bag: it correctly gives an option to use Office in “Azerbaijani,” but its keyboard options in the same program use “Azeri.”
What then, could be another reason for this preference to misname the people inhabiting Azerbaijan and the language they all speak? Part of the answer may lie in its legacy of being subjected to imperial colonialization. Split between the Russian and Iranian empires for many centuries, the Russians and Persians used misnomers over the years to refer to the Azerbaijanis. Russian sources often referred to the group as “Tatars,” and English language sources up until the twentieth century reflected this Russian terminology as well. Many Farsi sources still refer to the Azerbaijanis as “Azeris” and their language as “Azeri.” Such and similar sources often claim that they are not “real” Turks, but actually originate from a Persian tribe (the Azeris) and that they have been Turkified in both identity and language by successive Turkic empires that ruled Iran.
Not very plausible, especially since many of the Azerbaijanis in Iran are mountain dwellers, and it seems quite unlikely that these empires reached these groups and changed their native language. Effectually all Azerbaijani intellectuals, including those living in Iran, find the term “Azeri” derogatory, since they view at as part of the attempt of Persian nationalists to deny their separate identity. Despite the fact that the Azerbaijanis comprise up to one third of the population in Iran, Tehran neither allows the group’s members to use their own language in official settings nor to educate their children in their mother tongue.
As COP29 comes around, politicians, journalists, analysts, and activists alike should make a concerted effort to refer correctly to the people and language of Azerbaijan as do the people who live there: “Azerbaijanis” and “Azerbaijani,” respectively. As one prominent Azerbaijani linguist has written, “prevailing public and scholarly opinion in contemporary Azerbaijan does not support the use of the term “Azeri.” At the end of the day, that should be reason enough: much as the English-speaking world has gotten used to writing the capital of Ukraine as “Kyiv,” accepted that Bombay is now called “Mumbai”, stopped calling the Inuit people “Eskimos,” and Türkiye” is increasingly replacing the way we refer to the country whose capital used to be called Constantinople. There is simply no good reason for English-language users not to use the preferred word—Azerbaijani.
Prof. Brenda Shaffer is a faculty member of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Senior Advisor for Energy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center.
A former senior UN and Serbian official, Damjan Krnjević Mišković is Professor of Practice at ADA University in Baku, Azerbaijan, and Director for Policy Research, Analysis, and Publications at its Institute for Development and Diplomacy (IDD).
