Beside my grandparents’ apartment door stands a potted plant with a note to fellow building occupants, handwritten in Azerbaijani by my grandfather: “Бура кул габы деjил,” or “This is not an ashtray.” Though it has been over thirty years since Azerbaijan officially adopted Latin script for the Azerbaijani language after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, my grandfather’s default choice of the long-abandoned Cyrillic script is not surprising; his generation had been using it on an everyday basis, in every context, for much of the 20th century. However, this was not the first time the language had changed its writing system.
Over the past 100 years, the Azerbaijani language has undergone more script changes than many languages experience in their entire written history. The periods between the three shifts in the Azerbaijani writing system serve as a visual roadmap of the country’s century-long experience of detachment and reconciliation with its Turkic identity and Islamic heritage. In spite of shifting cultural dynamics and periods of institutional repression, the Azerbaijani language evolved into a distinct linguistic phenomenon and remains a source of pride for Azerbaijanis, sustained by its consistent use as a spoken language regardless of what form it took on paper at any given time.
Until 1929, Azerbaijani had been written in the Perso-Arabic script, reflecting two critical roots of the modern Azerbaijani language and identity. First, it signified the enduring presence of Islam, which reached Azerbaijan in the 7th century and gave rise to a rich Islamic intellectual tradition, particularly through the teachings of the Quran in Arabic. Second, the use of this script reflected the significant impact of Persian, the language of Iran, which shaped Azerbaijani culture and literature during the centuries when Azerbaijan was part of the Persian dynasties until Russia annexed it in the early 1800s. Azerbaijani, in its Perso-Arabic script, went on to serve as the vessel for the works of Azerbaijan’s classical poets, including the 15th-century Sufi poet Nasimi and the 19th-century Natavan, also a celebrated female political figure.
The influx of Turkish influences into Azerbaijani in the 11th century led to substantial phonemic shifts that made the Perso-Arabic script increasingly less-suited for representing the language accurately. This also made advancing literacy challenging, but the use of the script persisted due to its close ties with the vital role of religion and education, at this point deeply intertwined. However, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many members of the Azerbaijani elite were advocating for alphabet reform, primarily to make the language more accessible to a broader population. The suggestions ranged from modifying the existing script to abandoning it altogether in favor of Latinization. At the beginning of the 20th century, the calls for Latinization gained momentum, underlined by the goal of secularization—that is, disentangling civil society from religious authority. These efforts, however, were abruptly halted by the Soviet invasion in 1920. Still, the vision and dedication of 20th-century Azerbaijani intellectuals would prove fundamental in shaping the independent Azerbaijani Republic’s approach to language reform decades later.
As part of the pursuit of total literacy across the newly incorporated Soviet republics through standardization of the writing system, Stalin’s regime introduced the Latin alphabet in 1929, incorporating some Cyrillic letters. Simultaneously, Stalin’s regime sought to suppress religious practices and institutions, resulting in the closure and demolition of many mosques in Azerbaijan. Given the connection between the Azerbaijani language and the historical dominance of Islam, Latinization was also a tool for diminishing Islamic influences, at least in their visual form. Notably, while the campaign’s dismantling of religious institutions extended to neighboring Christian-majority Armenia and Georgia, their writing systems remained unchanged, allowing them to preserve their indigenous scripts, which serve as cornerstones to their religious tradition. This selective script reform suggests that, beyond promoting literacy, Soviet language policy was also a calculated effort to weaken Islamic cultural and religious ties among Muslim populations rather than a consistent push for pan-Soviet linguistic standardization.
The policy of de-Islamization was soon followed by a more aggressive push toward de-Turkification: Just a decade later, the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet was formally enforced to further distance Azerbaijanis from a pan-Turkic identity and accelerate the acquisition of the Russian language. Although there were five other Muslim-majority republics in the Soviet Union, all larger than Azerbaijan, the country’s geography made it a particularly delicate case—it was the only one of the six to share a border with both Iran and Turkey. It is plausible to suggest that the Soviet authorities had concerns that Azerbaijan’s proximity to two imperial Muslim-majority powers, with which it had deep-rooted political and cultural ties—largely built on Islam and the common use of Perso-Arabic script—would make it more difficult to integrate into the Union.
Not only did Soviet policies reshape Azerbaijani linguistically and socially through Russification and stigmatization, but they also permanently altered relations between Azerbaijanis in the region. To this day, the Perso-Arabic script remains in use by millions of ethnic Azerbaijanis living in northern Iran. After more than a millennium, Azerbaijani in its Perso-Arabic form ceased to be a unifying cultural marker for Azerbaijani speakers on both sides of the border—a product of the Soviet-imposed reform and, later, the decisions that the Azerbaijanis in the new Republic would make about their language on their own accord.
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the new Azerbaijani Republic finally had the freedom to independently explore and define the values its language would embody. Just four days after declaring independence, the Azerbaijani parliament voted to abandon the Cyrillic script and adopt the Latin alphabet, although the full transition would only be completed ten years later. While the modern alphabet closely resembles Turkish, it maintains a distinct character with a set of additional letters that accommodate its unique phonemic structure. Moreover, the alphabet holds a different kind of symbolic value—this was the first change in the writing system to be implemented by Azerbaijanis on their own terms.
The shift to the Latin script was arguably a pragmatic decision—aligning Azerbaijan with other Turkic nations that had adopted the Latin alphabet (such as Turkish, Uzbek, and Turkmen, with ongoing efforts to Latinize Kazakh) and distancing itself from the legacy of Russian imperialism—but it has also faced minor criticism. Some in the Azerbaijani literary and scholarly community critique the complete abandonment of the Perso-Arabic script, contending that Azerbaijan’s literary and scholarly heritage from the medieval period will remain inaccessible to modern readers. That said, it is important to note that before the 20th century, Azerbaijani writers and readers were required to have, at a minimum, knowledge of Quranic Arabic and fluency in Persian, in addition to their native Azerbaijani, to understand literary works. In other words, even if Azerbaijan had retained the Perso-Arabic script after 1991, it would not have substantially improved access to its classical literary heritage, as the language had already shed much of its Persian and Arabic influence through earlier reforms, and had evolved toward a more coherent, secular form well before the 1929 script reform.
Though the parliament in 1991 was unlikely to have considered any script other than Latin, the decision also reflected shifting priorities in a rapidly changing world. While Azerbaijan had left the USSR—a period marked by multiple script reforms—changes in the wider world continued unabated. The rise of globalization and the drive to modernize, including through language and script, reinforced the move toward Latinization. Perhaps 200 years earlier, when Islam played a central role in daily life and Azerbaijan’s primary relations were with other Turkic and Muslim-majority nations, the idea of abandoning the Perso-Arabic script would have been unthinkable. Even in the face of frequent, drastic reforms and colonial suppression, there is no dispute that in all of its forms, Azerbaijanis have carried their language with pride, embodying and reinforcing the reason why it is called “mother tongue” and not “mother alphabet.” Though scripts may shift with the tides of power, the language—spoken, sung, and passed down through generations—cannot be rewritten.