The modern Azerbaijani alphabet contains 32 letters — 25 shared with the standard Latin alphabet and 7 characters unique to Azerbaijani. Understanding these letters is the foundation of reading, writing, and correctly typing the language.
The Full Alphabet in Order
The official Azerbaijani Latin alphabet, adopted in its current form in 1991 and refined by the Law on the State Language in 2001, is ordered as follows:
A, B, C, Ç, D, E, Ə, F, G, Ğ, H, X, I, İ, J, K, Q, L, M, N, O, Ö, P, R, S, Ş, T, U, Ü, V, Y, Z
Several things are immediately visible. The letter C does not represent the English "k" sound or the soft "s" sound — in Azerbaijani, C is pronounced as a hard "dj" sound, like the "j" in "jump." The letter Q represents the back uvular stop, a sound further back in the throat than the English K. And the familiar-looking X is not a ks-cluster but rather the voiceless velar fricative, like the "ch" in Scottish "loch." These differences from English letter values are not minor: they define the phonological character of the language.
The alphabet is notably absent several letters found in English: there is no W, no separate K used for the same sound as in English (Azerbaijani K is the palatal velar stop, while Q handles the back uvular), and no distinction that English makes with C/K/Q being essentially redundant in that script. Each of the 32 Azerbaijani letters maps to one and only one phoneme — the script is genuinely phonemic, a property that English conspicuously lacks.
The Seven Special Characters
Seven letters in the Azerbaijani alphabet cannot be produced on a standard English-language keyboard without using special input methods. These letters are not decorative or optional — they represent sounds that are phonemically distinct and semantically load-bearing. Omitting them produces incorrect Azerbaijani, not a simplified version of it.
Ə / ə — The Schwa (type: ae)
The schwa is arguably the most important special character in Azerbaijani. It represents an open front unrounded vowel, similar to the "a" in English "cat" but produced slightly more centrally. In IPA notation it is /æ/ when stressed, closer to /ə/ in unstressed positions — the Azerbaijani letter covers both. Example words: əl (hand), əmək (labour), ləzzət (taste), kənd (village). The uppercase form Ə appears at the start of sentences and in proper nouns. On Yaz.Az, type ae to produce ə and AE to produce Ə.
A critical point: ə and e are different vowels. They are not interchangeable. El (a dialectal word for "people" or "country") is not the same as əl (hand). Treating them as equivalent — as many diaspora speakers writing on standard keyboards do — creates ambiguity and is considered informal at best, incorrect at worst.
Ö / ö — Front Rounded O (type: oe)
Ö represents the close-mid front rounded vowel, identical in quality to the German ö or the French eu. English lacks this vowel, but speakers of German, Swedish, Turkish, or Hungarian will immediately recognise it. The lips are rounded as for "o" while the tongue position moves forward toward "e." Example words: göz (eye), dörd (four), öz (self, own), köhnə (old). On Yaz.Az, type oe for ö or o' as an alternative.
Ü / ü — Front Rounded U (type: ue)
Ü is the close front rounded vowel — the same sound as German ü or French u. The tongue is at a high-front position while the lips are rounded. Example words: üz (face), ürək (heart), gül (flower, rose), üçün (for, in order to). On Yaz.Az, type ue for ü or u' as an alternative. This character is particularly important because it participates actively in vowel harmony — many suffixes appear in ü-form when the root vowel is ü or ö.
I / ı — Dotless I (type: ii)
The dotless ı is perhaps the most confusing letter for non-native learners because it looks like a standard "i" with something missing. In fact it is an entirely different phoneme: the close back unrounded vowel /ɯ/, a sound that English does not have. The tongue is at the same high position as for the English "ee" sound, but pulled back toward the position of the "oo" in "food" — without rounding the lips. Example words: qış (winter), balıq (fish), ılıq (warm), bıçaq (knife). On Yaz.Az, type ii (double i) to produce ı. The double-i convention is deliberate: it is memorable and avoids ambiguity with the dotted İ/i.
İ / i — Dotted I
This is the standard Latin i, but the uppercase form deserves attention. In Azerbaijani, the uppercase of dotted i is İ — an i with a dot on top. This is the same convention as Turkish and stands in direct contrast to the uppercase of dotless ı, which is I (no dot). Most standard Latin fonts and keyboard systems preserve this distinction correctly in Azerbaijani text, but some older digital systems and poorly localised applications strip diacritics and collapse both forms into the same character, causing errors. Example words: il (year), isti (hot), ip (rope), işıq (light). On Yaz.Az, a single i produces the dotted form.
Ğ / ğ — Soft G (type: gh)
The letter ğ represents the voiced velar fricative in Azerbaijani, though its realisation varies considerably by dialect and context. In formal, careful speech it is a voiced fricative produced in the same place as the K and G sounds. Between vowels, particularly adjacent to back vowels, it often weakens to a voiced approximant or even disappears, lengthening the preceding vowel. This is why ğ is sometimes called the "soft G" — it rarely sounds like a hard stop. Example words: ağ (white), dağ (mountain), bağ (garden), ağac (tree). On Yaz.Az, type gh for ğ and GH for Ğ.
Ç / ç — Azerbaijani CH (type: ch)
The letter ç represents the voiceless palatal affricate /tʃ/ — exactly the same sound as the English "ch" in "church" or "cheese." It is not a soft sound in Azerbaijani; it is always a full affricate. Example words: çay (tea, also river), çiçək (flower), çox (many, very), uçmaq (to fly). On Yaz.Az, type ch for ç and CH for Ç. Note that since C in Azerbaijani is already used for the dj sound, Ç was assigned to the ch sound — a logical pairing that differs from Spanish or French conventions.
Ş / ş — Azerbaijani SH (type: sh)
The letter ş represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ — the "sh" in English "ship" or "shore." It is a frequent consonant in Azerbaijani and appears in a large number of common words. Example words: şəhər (city), şirin (sweet), işıq (light), başlamaq (to begin), gəzişmək (to stroll). On Yaz.Az, type sh for ş and SH for Ş.
Letters That Differ from English Values
Beyond the seven special characters, several letters that look familiar to English speakers represent different sounds in Azerbaijani. Understanding these differences is essential for anyone learning to read the script.
C — Not the English "k" or "s" sound. In Azerbaijani, C is always the voiced palatal affricate /dʒ/, like the "j" in "jungle." Example: cəld (quick), cavab (answer).
Q — The uvular stop /q/, produced further back in the throat than K. This is a distinct phoneme from K in Azerbaijani. Example: qəlb (heart), qapı (door), qış (winter).
X — The voiceless velar fricative /x/, as in the German "Bach" or Scottish "loch." Not a ks-cluster. Example: xəbər (news), xoş (pleasant), axşam (evening).
J — The voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/, like the "s" in "measure" or the French "j" in "jour." Example: jurnal (journal), janr (genre).
Y — Always a palatal approximant /j/, as in the English "yes" — never the English long-i vowel sound. Example: yaxşı (good), yazmaq (to write).
Vowel Harmony
One of the most structurally important features of Azerbaijani — and one that the alphabet directly reflects — is vowel harmony. Azerbaijani is an agglutinative Turkic language, meaning that words are built by stacking suffixes onto roots. Vowel harmony is the rule that governs which form of a suffix is used depending on the vowels present in the root.
Azerbaijani vowels divide into two groups:
- Front vowels: e, ə, i (İ), ö, ü
- Back vowels: a, ı, o, u
When a suffix is added to a root, the vowel in the suffix must harmonise with the last vowel of the root. For example, the plural suffix is either -lar (after back vowels) or -lər (after front vowels). So: kitab (book) becomes kitablar (books) because "a" is a back vowel, but gül (flower) becomes güllər (flowers) because "ü" is a front vowel.
This system extends through every suffix in the language — the dative, the ablative, the genitive, the verbal endings, the question particle, the negation marker — all of them harmonise with the root vowel. This is why the Azerbaijani alphabet's precise representation of vowels matters so much. If ə and e are collapsed into a single character, or if ü is written as u, the vowel harmony pattern becomes opaque and suffixation becomes unpredictable.
The ı / İ distinction also feeds into vowel harmony. Words containing ı (back unrounded) take back-vowel suffixes, while words containing i (İ, front) take front-vowel suffixes. Confusing the two letters does not just misrepresent the sound — it disrupts the harmony system for all subsequent suffixes.
Uppercase and Lowercase Pairs
Every Azerbaijani letter has both an uppercase and a lowercase form. The standard pairs are:
A/a, B/b, C/c, Ç/ç, D/d, E/e, Ə/ə, F/f, G/g, Ğ/ğ, H/h, X/x, I/ı, İ/i, J/j, K/k, Q/q, L/l, M/m, N/n, O/o, Ö/ö, P/p, R/r, S/s, Ş/ş, T/t, U/u, Ü/ü, V/v, Y/y, Z/z
The I/ı and İ/i pairs are the source of the greatest confusion in digital text. Most Western fonts and operating systems handle these correctly today, but early digital Azerbaijani text — particularly text produced in the late 1990s and early 2000s — is frequently corrupted because the dotted and dotless forms were not distinguished. Many documents from that era need manual correction to restore the proper characters.
The dotless uppercase I (no dot) and the dotted uppercase İ (with dot) are visually very similar on screen, particularly in small font sizes or with certain font families. When reviewing Azerbaijani text, it is worth zooming in or using a font that clearly distinguishes the two forms.
Alphabetical Order and Sorting
The official alphabetical order places Ç immediately after C, Ə immediately after E, Ğ immediately after G, I (dotless) before İ (dotted), Ö immediately after O, Ş immediately after S, and Ü immediately after U. This ordering is important in contexts such as dictionaries, indices, official documents, and databases. Software that sorts Azerbaijani text using standard Unicode ordering will produce incorrect results unless it is specifically configured with the Azerbaijani locale, because Unicode sorts by code point and the Azerbaijani letters are scattered across the Latin Extended-A and Latin Extended Additional blocks rather than being contiguous with the base Latin letters they follow.
The letter X (representing /x/) falls between H and I in the Azerbaijani alphabet — after H and before I. This placement reflects the Azerbaijani phonological system rather than any Latin-script convention, and it means that X words sort between H and I in a correctly sorted Azerbaijani dictionary.
How to Type Every Special Letter on Yaz.Az
Yaz.Az provides a simple, consistent shortcode system for all seven special characters. The shortcodes are designed to be phonetically intuitive — they use the digraph that most closely approximates each sound in standard English keyboard conventions:
- Type ae to produce ə — the "ae" digraph evokes the open quality of the schwa.
- Type oe to produce ö — the German convention.
- Type ue to produce ü — the German convention.
- Type ii to produce ı (dotless i) — double i signals "different i."
- Type gh to produce ğ — "soft g."
- Type ch to produce ç — the English digraph for this sound.
- Type sh to produce ş — the English digraph for this sound.
Uppercase variants follow naturally: AE produces Ə, GH produces Ğ, CH produces Ç, SH produces Ş. Title-case inputs like Sh at the start of a sentence correctly produce Ş. The tool also accepts e', o', and u' as alternatives using an apostrophe, which some users find faster than the two-vowel digraphs.
One deliberate design decision: a bare e never automatically becomes ə. This prevents corruption of Latin loanwords, email addresses, and proper nouns. You must explicitly use the two-character shortcode to signal your intent to produce the Azerbaijani schwa.
Learning the Alphabet: Practical Advice
For learners coming from English, the most important adjustments are: treating C, Q, and X as entirely different sounds from their English values; accepting that I and İ are two separate letters representing two separate phonemes; and understanding that ə is not just "a funny e" but a genuinely distinct vowel that changes the meaning of words. The rest of the alphabet follows fairly predictable phonetic logic once these reassignments are made.
The 7 special characters and their phonetic values: ə (open front), ö (front rounded o), ü (front rounded u), ı (back unrounded i), ğ (voiced velar/uvular approximant), ç (voiceless palatal affricate), ş (voiceless postalveolar fricative). Together they mark the sounds that make Azerbaijani phonologically distinct from generic Latin-script languages, and they are the reason a tool like Yaz.Az exists: without them, the language cannot be written correctly on a standard keyboard.
Written by Habib Huseynzade, Azerbaijani developer and native speaker.