Qashqai language

Qashqai (قشقایی ديلى, Qašqāyī dili, pronounced in English as /ˈkæʃkaɪ/ KASH-ky, and also spelled Qaşqay, Qashqayi, Kashkai, Kashkay, Qašqāʾī and Qashqa'i or Kaşkay) is an Oghuz Turkic language spoken by the Qashqai people, an ethnic group living mainly in the Fars province of Southern Iran. Encyclopædia Iranica regards Qashqai as an independent third group of dialects within the Southwestern Turkic language group. It is known to speakers as Turki. Estimates of the number of Qashqai speakers vary. Ethnologue gave a figure of 1.0 million in 2021.

The Qashqai language is closely related to Azerbaijani. However, some Qashqai varieties, namely the variety spoken in the Sheshbeyli tribe, share features with Turkish. In a sociopolitical sense, though, Qashqai is considered a language in its own right.

Like other Turkic languages spoken in Iran, such as the Azerbaijani language, Qashqai uses a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script.

Qashqai follows common Turkic syntax features: dependent marking, head-final within unmarked phrases, free word order with SOV preferred, agglutinative. Grammatical cases in Qashqai Turkic include: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, ablative, terminative, equative and instrumental.