Azerbaijani is spoken primarily by the Azerbaijanis, who are concentrated mainly in Transcaucasia. The language has official status in Azerbaijan and Dagestan (a federal subject of Russia) but not in Iranian Azerbaijan where the majority of Azeri speakers live. The language is also spoken to lesser varying degrees in Azerbaijani communities of Georgia, Iraq, and Turkey. Azerbaijani has two primary divisions, North Azerbaijani (spoken in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Russia) and South Azerbaijani (spoken in Iran), and is closely related to Turkish, Qashqai, Turkmen and Crimean Tatar, sharing varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with each of those languages. North Azerbaijani and South Azerbaijani are sometimes classified as separate languages. North Azerbaijani is spoken in Azerbaijan, where is the official language, and also southern Dagestan, in the southern Caucasus Mountains and in parts of Central Asia. There are around 7.3 million native speakers, and another 8 million second language speakers. South Azerbaijani has about 16.9 million speakers mainly in the northwest of Iran and also in parts of Iraq and Turkey, and in Afghanistan and Syria. Since 1992, the Latin Alphabet has been adopted and we now have essentially a full generation of people who have used this alphabet. This dictionary focuses on this orthography. Azerbaijani is a very phonetic language, so pronunciation is very easy. Most words are pronounced exactly as they are spelled in modern Azeri alphabet.