Afshar language

language
name=Afshar
states=Afghanistan, Iran
region=Kabul area, Kerman area
speakers=600,000?
familycolor=Altaic
fam1=Altaic [" [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90009] Ethnologue"] (controversial)
fam2=Turkic
fam3=Oghuz
fam4=Azerbaijani
script=Perso-Arabic script
iso1=az|iso2=aze
lc1=aze|ld1=Azerbaijani (generic)|ll1=none



Map showing locations of Azerbaijani and related languages: North Azerbaijani (blue), South Azerbaijani (red), Salchuq (green), Qashqa'i (brown), Afshari (purple)

Afshar or Afshari, is a Turkic language spoken in parts of Afghanistan and Iran. There are some speakers in Syria and Turkey. It is considered by many to be a dialect of Azerbaijani. 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 Dari and a rounding of the phoneme /IPA|a/ to /IPA|ɒ/, as occurred in Uzbek. In many cases, vowels that are rounded in Azerbaijani are not rounded in Afshar. An example of this is "IPA|jiz" (meaning "100"), which is "IPA|jyz" in standard Azerbaijani.

References