Azerbaijani, also called Azeri, is an Oghuz Turkic language closely related to Turkish and spoken by around 30 million people worldwide. The language has undergone three dramatic script changes in the 20th century alone: it was written in the Arabic script until 1929, briefly switched to a Latin alphabet, then shifted to Cyrillic in 1939 under Soviet pressure. After independence in 1991, Azerbaijan returned to a revised Latin script, which became official in 2001. The Soviet era left a significant Russian vocabulary layer in the language, while earlier centuries contributed a rich body of Persian and Arabic loanwords. Azerbaijani is also spoken in the neighbouring Iranian provinces of East and West Azerbaijan, where it retains the Arabic-derived script.
