Azerbaijani (Azeri) voice over services

Azerbaijani — Azeri — is a Turkic language of the Oghuz branch, official in the Republic of Azerbaijan and spoken by a large population in north-western Iran. Most of the commercial work we see in it is energy, finance, corporate training, broadcast and consumer content, with Baku as the business centre.

The thing to settle before anything else is which market you are recording for, because the two write it differently. In Azerbaijan the language uses the Latin alphabet. In Iran it uses the Perso-Arabic script, read right to left. Spoken, that distinction does not exist. The moment your project has subtitles, captions, on-screen titles or interface text, it decides the font, the reading direction and the layout — and getting it wrong means rebuilding the graphics, not tweaking them.

The reason it works this way is worth a sentence, because it also explains your archive material. Azerbaijani has changed alphabet three times in a century: Perso-Arabic until 1929, then Latin, then Cyrillic from 1939, then back to Latin after independence in 1991. Older documents, older signage and older speakers all carry the assumptions of whichever era they come from.

Second decision: Turkish is not a substitute. The two are close Oghuz languages and speakers follow each other reasonably well, which is exactly why the shortcut gets suggested. But Azerbaijani carries Russian and Persian loan vocabulary that Turkish does not, and a Baku audience identifies an Istanbul reader within a sentence. If you need both markets, we record Turkish on its own roster.

Typical work is oil, gas and energy sector content, banking and financial services, corporate and safety training, government and civic information, broadcast and consumer advertising, and eLearning for organisations operating in the Caspian region.