If there are ever any doubts about 54-year-old Elman Zalkhayev’s cultural lineage, he’s got the Soviet-era identity card to prove it. Proudly, he points to the line that identifies him as Avar. 

“I am Avar since I opened my eyes,” declares Zalkhayev, an unemployed resident of the village of Khalatala in northern Azerbaijan, located roughly 10 kilometers from the Georgian border. “I knew that I am Avar since I started to understand the world." 

In Russia’s neighboring Dagestan, the Avars rank as the largest ethnic minority, but in Azerbaijan their numbers amount to roughly the size of a large town -- some 49,800 people, according to the last census in 2009.  Calling themselves “Ma’rulal,” which means “mountain people,” they live mostly in Azerbaijan’s mountainous northwestern regions of Balakan and Zaqatala, about 400 kilometers from the capital, Baku.

Unlike in Soviet times, Azerbaijani ID cards do not identify these citizens’ ethnicity. That detail today appears only on their birth certificates.

But its presence still matters for Avars.

In the past, they have sometimes been incorrectly categorized as Lezgis, another Dagestan-based people who speak a separate, northeast Caucasian language.

For centuries, Avars have had to contend with the impact of Russia as well.  Under Soviet rule, “the Russian language and culture were predominant . . .” notes Zalkhayev, who formerly worked for Russia’s Federal Migration Service in Dagestan.

His own last name has been Russianized. In Avar, it would be “Zalkhatsul.” 

But Russia has not been the only larger community with which Azerbaijan’s Avars have had to come to terms. Until he went to school, Zalkhayev was unaware that he lived among ethnic Azerbaijanis.

“Both of my parents are Avars, so I perceived the world around me in the Avar language.  I learnt about other ethnicities in the region only when I went to school,” he explains.

While mixed ethnic Avar-Azerbaijani families exist, “very often the children from such families choose the identity of that parent who is associated with the majority ethnic group; in this case, with Azerbaijanis,” comments sociologist Sergei Rumyansev, who has previously researched Azerbaijan’s Avars.

Concerns about discrimination, and how it could affect career prospects or the ability to visit relatives in Dagestan, do persist, but are minimal, adds Rumyansev, who works at the non-governmental Center for Independent Social Research in Berlin.  

Nonetheless, Azerbaijan’s Avars still very much retain their own identity. Language is at the center of that.

“In the ’70 to ‘80s, Avars did not know the Azerbaijani language at all,” Zalkhayev stresses. All communication in the village was in Avar, he remembers.  “This is why we could save our language.”

Written in Cyrillic, the language has used Georgian, Arabic and Latin-based alphabets in the past and features four distinct dialects.  

Azerbaijan offers no regular public education for children in Avar, but juveniles in Khalatala, a settlement of a few thousand people, can attend private language classes.

Along with other forms of interaction, it appears to be having an effect.

Khalatala remains a predominantly Avar-speaking village, Zalkhayev underlines, where “[e]ven in the official agencies . . . everyone speaks Avar.”

 Lala Aliyeva provided additional reporting for this story.

                                     June 2018, Identity Edition