Adharic

Adharic is the North-Western Iranian subgroup named after Adhari, or Old Azeri, the Iranian speech of Azerbaijan before the spread of Turkic. Medieval Arab geographers such as al-Masudi knew it as al-adhariya, and the peasant rebels who followed Babak in the 800s spoke its dialects.

From the 1000s the Seljuk advance brought Turkic tribes into Azerbaijan. Adhari lost its majority position by the end of the 1300s, lingering in mountain enclaves into the 1600s before giving way to Azerbaijani Turkic.

Its relatives include Talysh of Gilan and Ardabil, which Hamdallah Mustawfi in the 1330s described as a Pahlavi-type tongue and which survives in the quatrains of Sheikh Safi of Ardabil, who died in 1334; Tati dialects such as Harzandi; and Zazaki in eastern Anatolia, whose archaic grammar has been argued to be a relic of Parthian.