THE INFLUENCE OF THE AZERBAIJANI LANGUAGE ON SHAHRIYAR’S PERSIAN-LANGUAGE WORKS

Abstract

This article examines the directions and scope of the Azerbaijani language’s influence on the Persian language based on the eminent poet Mohammad Hossein Shahriyar’s Persian-language Di-van. The study shows that this influence manifests on three planes—lexical, syntactic, and stylistic-poetic. On the lexical plane, Shahriyar not only employs units shared by both languages, but also introduces words and collocations that are not considered standard in Persian literary language yet are in active circulation in Azerbaijani Turkic. Such units impart additional semantic nuance, emo-tional intensity, and cultural associations (homeland, village-community, ancestral world, and spatial codes such as yaylaq–qışlaq) to the text, enriching the poetic landscape with a “folk-like” and sincere tone.
At the syntactic level, the influence appears chiefly through the transfer into Persian of idioms and phraseological patterns as well as discourse-act structures. Parallel constructions characteristic of colloquial speech, the high frequency of exclamatory and interrogative sentences, the abundance of vocative address formulas (in the spirit of ustadname invocations), and rhythmic pairings and repeti-tions typical of Azerbaijani Turkic are consistently visible in Shahriyar’s Persian poems. This is not merely a “mixing” at the word level, but an intervention that alters the internal flow of discourse and animates its syntactic dynamics.
On the stylistic-poetic plane, Shahriyar partially distances himself from the heavy, ornate orna-mentation of classical Persian poetry, shaping an expressive system closer to colloquial speech—sincere and accessible. The lyricism of the ashig–bayati tradition and folk poetic techniques such as tajnis (paronomasia) and internal rhyme acquire a fresh life within the aruz meter; consequently, the naturalness of feeling is prioritized over the pomp of diction. Consequently, Shahriyar’s Persian-language writing models a productive instance of language contact: the spirit and imagistic system of Azerbaijani open new semantic possibilities within the Persian poetic milieu, enhance communicative flexibility, and create an intercultural bridge. These findings have practical significance for contact linguistics as well as for translation studies and stylistics; future research may be deepened through corpus-based frequency analysis, the distribution of phraseologisms, and statistics of syntactic mod-els.