Qashqai

Qashqai (Qašqāyī) is a South Oghuz Turkic language spoken by the Qashqai tribal confederation of Fars Province in south-central Iran, with significant populations also in Bushehr, Kohgiluyeh-Boyer-Ahmad, Isfahan and Khuzestan. Despite being geographically isolated from the main Oghuz heartland (Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan), it is genealogically closest to Azerbaijani — sharing the Oghuz vowel harmony, agglutinative case suffixes, and personal endings — rather than to Turkish. Centuries of contact with Persian and Lori have produced extensive Iranian lexical borrowing and some calques in subordination patterns (Csató 2005). The Qashqai people remain partially nomadic, conducting one of the world's largest surviving long-distance seasonal migrations (ilraah) between summer pastures in the Zagros highlands and winter quarters in the southern lowlands. There is no codified standard orthography; Perso-Arabic is used in publications and Latin in scholarship.