ABSTRACT
Introduction Iran was one of the last regions of the world to be explored linguistically. This is especially true of the languages of the Turkic peoples there. Only the language of Azerbaijan in the northwest and that of the Kashkay (Qasqä'I) including the Aynallu region in the southwest were fairly well-known. However, even the Azerbaijanian of Iran was only sparsely researched compared with the Azerbaijanian spoken in the Soviet Union. Although English and Russian scholars had visited Khorasan, they had not recorded any Turkic texts or linguistic forms. The few recordings of Khalaj, spoken in central Iran, had either been noted in corrupted form, i.e. mixed with Oghuz forms, or disregarded.
