The Arabic Lexical Units in Medieval Literary Azerbaijani

Abstract

The article reviews the period of Literary Azerbaijani beginning from the epics of “Dede Korkut” to the 16th century. It indicates that Arabic has influenced Azerbaijani since the most ancient times, i.e., beginning from the time when the Arabs occupied Azerbaijan approximately in the 2nd half of the 7th century, and since that period the Arabic lexical units have been used in Azerbaijani. This influence was first at the level of oral language, but when the written form of Literary Azerbaijani began to be established in the 13th century, Arabic influenced our written literary language too and since that time has manifested itself brightly in the works of Hasanoghlu, Gazi Burhan Uddin, Nasimi and our other poets. That is, while in Gazi Burhan Uddin’s works the Arabic lexical units manifested themselves massively for the first time in our literary language, in Nasimi’s poetry the Arabic lexical units served somewhat to make Nasimi’s language philosophic and scientific. However, already in the 16th century in Fuzuli’s works the frequency of the use of the Arabic lexical units in Literary Azerbaijani reached its peak from both the quantitative and qualitative points of view. In Fuzuli’s works the essence and semantic features of the Arabic lexical units were revealed, at the same time, these lexical units facilitated the promotion of Fuzuli’s language which, consequently, was admired not only in the Western group of the Turkic languages, but also in their Eastern group.