Adhari

Before Turkification the Adharis were Iranian speakers of northwestern Iran and the eastern Caucasus; their tongue, Old Azari, was a Northwestern Iranian language akin to Talysh and Tati. Arab geographers noted Adhari dialects across Azerbaijan and the Caspian coast, where peasants, including followers of Babak's ninth-century revolt, also spoke standard Persian; Nizami of Ganja sprang from this Iranian milieu.

North of the Aras the same stock formed the Tats, partly descended from Sasanian garrisons under Khosrow I. Under the Shirvanshahs the Tats became townsmen and farmers of Shirvan and Baku.

Oghuz Turkic spread with Seljuk arrival in the eleventh century, accelerating under the Mongols, yet in the 1340s chronicler Mostawfi called Maragheh and Zanjan speech modified Pahlavi; Tabriz stayed Iranian-speaking through the fourteenth century. Adhari lost majority status in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, surviving only in enclaves like Harzand. The Shirvanshahs fell to the Safavids in 1538; Tats were absorbed into Azerbaijani Turkish identity, though pockets near Baku and Dagestan kept their language.