Attitude towards Azeri language in Iran: a large-scale survey research

ABSTRACT

This survey research investigated the attitude of Iranian Azeri native speakers towards Azeri language. A questionnaire was developed and its reliability was estimated (r = 0.74) through a piloting phase on 54 Azeri native speakers. The participants, for the main phase of this study, were 400 Azeri native speakers with different social and educational backgrounds and from some densely Azeri-populated provinces in Iran. They completed either the online or the printed version of the survey, the results of which indicated that Iranian Azeri native speakers have a high level of positive attitude towards their mother tongue in spite of the negligence of this language in the Iranian educational system. The results of this study are discussed from a sociopolitical standpoint and their implications for the Iranian context are provided.

KEYWORDS:

• Azeri language
• identity
• Iran
• language attitude

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments, Mohammad Mehdi Hajmalek for checking the first draft of this paper, and Ava Bahrami for preparing the map.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Saeed Rezaei http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0296-0382

Notes

1 In this article, Azeri and Azeri Turkish are used interchangeably and are related to the Azeri language spoken in Northwestern Iran and do not refer to the language spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan.

2 The questionnaire is available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to thank the Sharif University of Technology, Research Office for funding this research project.