The Talysh Alphabet

The Talysh Latin alphabet has 32 letters — 8 vowels and 24 consonants. The alphabet is based on the Azerbaijani Latin script with modifications for Talysh-specific sounds. Special letters include Ə ə (schwa /ə/), Ü ü (front rounded /y/), Ğ ğ (velar fricative /ɣ/), Ç ç (/tʃ/), Ş ş (/ʃ/), and X x (/x/). The alphabet also distinguishes dotted İ i (/i/) from dotless I ı (/ɯ/).

Talysh is spoken primarily in two regions: the Lankaran-Astara region of the southern Republic of Azerbaijan, along the Caspian coast, and in Gilan Province of northern Iran. With an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 speakers, Talysh straddles the international border between Azerbaijan and Iran. The Republic of Azerbaijan has the more active Talysh literary and media tradition, with the Latin-based Talysh alphabet in use there. In Iran, the Persian script is used for Talysh when it is written, though Persian dominates in official contexts.

Talysh belongs to the Northwest Iranian branch of the Iranian language family, within the Caspian subgroup. Its closest relatives are Gilaki and Mazanderani, both spoken on the southern Caspian coast of Iran. Talysh is distinct from Persian (a Southwest Iranian language) and from Azerbaijani (a Turkic language), though Talysh has been significantly influenced by Azerbaijani through centuries of close contact. The Talysh alphabet shares several letters with Azerbaijani — Ə, Ğ, Ü — reflecting this phonological convergence.

Talysh is classified as vulnerable by UNESCO, indicating a real risk of language shift even among the intergenerational community. The language faces pressure from both Azerbaijani in Azerbaijan and Persian in Iran, both of which dominate education, media, and official life in their respective countries. Despite this, Talysh has a more robust situation than many minority Iranian languages: there are Talysh-language newspapers, radio programmes, and an active literary movement in Azerbaijan. The Talysh community has shown resilience in maintaining language use, though younger urban speakers increasingly shift to Azerbaijani or Persian.

Talysh in its primary written form (the Latin-based alphabet used in Azerbaijan) is written left to right, the same direction as English and other Latin-script languages. In Iran, Talysh is occasionally written using the Perso-Arabic script (which is right to left), following the Persian writing tradition. The Latin alphabet for Talysh was developed in Azerbaijan in the post-Soviet period, modelled on the Azerbaijani Latin script introduced in 1991, and is the standard form of written Talysh used in publishing and education within Azerbaijan.

The Talysh Latin alphabet is distinctive for its combination of Northwest Iranian phonological features and Azerbaijani orthographic conventions. Key features include: the dotted/dotless i distinction (İ i for /i/ vs. I ı for /ɯ/), shared with Turkish and Azerbaijani; the schwa letter Ə ə representing a vowel absent from most European Latin scripts; the velar fricative Ğ ğ representing /ɣ/ (found in Azerbaijani and Persian/Arabic as ghain); and X x representing the voiceless velar fricative /x/ (as in Scottish "loch"), a characteristic Iranian and Caucasian sound. Talysh also has both J j (/ʒ/) and C c (/dʒ/) as separate letters, and W w for an archaic Iranian bilabial approximant /w/ preserved in some dialects.