Data inaccuracy regarding "North Azerbaijani" and "South Azerbaijani" orthography

[Tural]

Hello,

I am a type designer and a native Azerbaijani speaker. And we use the Latin alphabet. I am opening this issue to report a data inaccuracy regarding the orthography of both "North Azerbaijani" and "South Azerbaijani".

As a native speaker, I would like to bring a few facts to your attention:

What you refer to as "South Azerbaijani" is Iran. Azerbaijanis live in Iran, but while they speak Azerbaijani among themselves, they use the Arabic-based Persian alphabet. Noting it in this format is technically incorrect.

When saying "North Azerbaijani", if you most likely mean the territory of Russia, specifically the Azerbaijanis living in Dagestan, they also speak Azerbaijani but use the Cyrillic alphabet.

Well then, could you tell me under what name you list the place actually called Azerbaijan, considering the alphabet there is Latin? Dividing the language geographically in this format is inaccurate in this context. I recommend that simply writing "Azerbaijani" in the list is more correct.

[MrBrezina]

Dear Tural,

North Azerbaijani is the official language of Azerbaijan as noted in the ISO standard or Ethnologue for example. South Azerbaijani is indeed spoken in Iran. There is no Central Azerbaijani in the ISO standard. I appreciate how this could be confusing. However, we need to adhere to the standard for the sake of international compatibility. I will add a note about that.

The South Azerbaijani in Hyperglot has two primary orthographies, one in the Perso-Arabic script and one in Latin when used outside Iran.

The North Azerbaijani has two primary orthographies, the Latin-script one used in Azerbaijan and the Cyrillic one used in Dagestan/Russia.

However, I think only the Perso-Arabic script should be considered primary for the South Azerbaijani and only the Latin script for the North Azerbaijani. The other two orthographies should be considered secondary. I have fixed this in the dev branch now.

Thank you for the report.

@kontur the website shows these multiple primary orthographies as “Required part of a multi-script orthography”. That is wrong.

[MrBrezina]

@Tural And of course, do let us know if there is anything else! Much appreciated.

[Tural]

@Tural And of course, do let us know if there is anything else! Much appreciated.

Hello,

Thank you for the prompt response and the detailed explanation.

I completely understand the necessity to adhere to ISO standards for international compatibility. My main concern was strictly the technical aspect of how foundries automatically display language support based on the primary scripts.

Would it be possible, for example, to use a naming format like "Azerbaijani (Cyrillic in Russia)", "Azerbaijani (Latin)", and "Azerbaijani (Perso-Arabic script in Iran)"? This could perfectly solve the issue for the type design community. In this way, both the region/country name and the used script are clearly visible.

Thank you again for your quick action and for maintaining such a valuable tool for our industry!