Azerbaijani is natively spoken by about 22 million people, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran, with smaller communities in Russia, Turkey, and Georgia. It is central to Azerbaijani cultural identity, known for its poetry, music, and traditions such as carpet weaving. Written in the Latin alphabet in Azerbaijan and the Persian script in Iran, Azerbaijani grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, vowel harmony, and agglutination, where suffixes are added to roots to modify meaning.