page_title: Karabakh dialect
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Karabakh dialect / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The capital city Shusha before its destruction in 1920. Nederlands: De stad Sjoesja voor de vernieling in 1920.
context_page_description: The Karabakh dialect, also known as Artsakh dialect is an ancient Eastern Armenian dialect with a unique phonetic and syntactic structure mainly spoken in the de facto independent Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and partially in the southern and northeastern parts of the Republic of Armenia, i.e. in the provinces of Artsakh, Utik, Syunik and Gugark of historical Armenia.
  The dialect was spoken by most Armenians living in Soviet Azerbaijan, particularly in the cities of Baku and Kirovabad. As the Nagorno-Karabakh War escalated, Armenians of Azerbaijan were forced to leave their homes. Today, most of Armenians immigrants and refugees from Azerbaijan live in Armenia and Russia, where along with standard Armenian and Russian, the Karabakh dialect is sometimes spoken.
  The dialect is considered to be one of the most widely spoken Armenian dialects. No accurate information on the number of speakers is available. The population of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is around 141,400, according to the 2010 data. An estimated 150,000 diaspora Armenians are originally from Karabakh.
context_section_description: According to Strabo (Geographica, Book XI, chapter 4), in the 1st century BC, the population of Armenia, up to Kura River, spoke Armenian.
  The 8th century Armenian historian Stepanos Syunetsi was the first one to mention the local dialect of Artsakh. In his «Բառք եղերականք» (Words of Tragedy), he wrote about the dialect of զԱրցախային meaning "of Artsakh", the historical Armenian name of Karabakh. According to the prominent linguist Hrachia Adjarian, Armenian dialects, including the Karabakh dialect started to develop in the 12th century. Adjarian argues that the damping of b, ɡ, d, dz, dʒ (բ, գ, դ, ձ, ջ) and their transformation to p, k, t, ts, tʃ (պ, տ, կ, ծ, ճ) took place before the invasion of Turkic people to the Armenian Highlands.
  In his 1909 book Classification des dialectes arméniens, Adjarian claims that the Karabakh dialect occupied the largest area of the Armenian dialects. According to Adjarian, it was spoken in the cities of Shusha, Elisabethpol (now Ganja), Nukha (now Shaki), Baku, Derbent, Agstafa, Dilijan, Karaklis (now Vanadzor), Kazak, Lori, Karadagh, Lilava quarter of Tabriz (Iran), Burdur and Ödemiş (in Turkey).
  Nagorno-Karabakh (nagorno means "mountainous" in Russian, comes from the Soviet-era name of the region, now used by the Western academia for political purposes of neutrality) has been historically populated by Armenians. Since the late Middle Ages, Turkic tribes migrated to the region and by the 19th century it was populated by both Armenians and partially by Azerbaijanis (called "Caucasian Tatars" at the time). After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Karabakh was disputed by independent Armenia and Azerbaijan with none of them completely controlling the claimed area. Karabakh was taken over by the Bolsheviks in 1920 and included in Soviet Azerbaijan in 1923.
  Until the late 1980s, most Armenians living in Soviet Azerbaijan spoke the Karabakh dialect. The Karabakh (75% Armenian-populated before the conflict) was officially under jurisdiction of Azerbaijan and was known as Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO). Besides Karabakh, many Armenians resided in the cities such as Baku, Kirovabad, Sumgait. In the late 1980s, Baku alone had an Armenian population of over 200,000. They were mainly from Karabakh and many of them spoke the dialect, although Russian as the main language of multicultural Baku, including Armenians of Baku.
  In 1988, with the relaxation of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev and his policies of perestroika and glasnost, the Armenians demanded the unification of NKAO with Soviet Armenia. The mass movement started in mid-February 1988 and on February 20, 1988, the regional council issued a request to transfer the region to Soviet Armenia. Few days later the Sumgait pogrom took place, leaving dozens of Armenian civilians dead and thousands being forced to leave. This event unofficially starting the Nagorno-Karabakh War. The clashes escalated to a full-scale war by 1992. Most Armenians of Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis of Armenia were forced to leave. The war ended in May 1994 with the Armenian forces establishing de facto control of Nagorno-Karabakh and several Azerbaijani districts surrounding the former NKAO. Today, the area is de facto under control of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, but is still recognized as de jure part of Azerbaijan by the international community.
caption: Shusha was the main center of Karabakh before the 1920 massacre and expulsion of the local Armenians by the Azerbaijani forces.[9]
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