The Borrowing Hierarchy of Azerbaijani from Persian

The present research is an attempt to study the borrowing hierarchy of Azerbaijani from Persian. The data collection was carried out using both library sources and field work. The majority of the data is from the speech interaction of Azerbaijani speakers living in the central part of Ardabil. The analysis of the data indicates that Azerbaijani speakers, in addition to using their native compound sentence patterns use Persian compound sentence patterns in their speech by borrowing Persian grammatical morphemes. Although a lot of Persian genitive and possessive phrases are used as borrowed phrases in Azerbaijani, these structures have not entered Azerbaijani as borrowed patterns. Persian prepositional phrases and Persian comparative adjective marker also appear as code-switched elements in bilinguals’ speech but they cannot be assumed as borrowed elements considering the borrowing code-switching distinguishing criterion. Evaluating research findings according to Stolz and Stolz (1996) suggested hierarchy of contact-induced changes and convergence progression shows that Persian subordinate compound sentence patterns have become more established in Azerbaijani system but the pattern borrowing has not occurred in phrase and word levels of Azerbaijani system yet.