Yaz.Az exists because typing in Azerbaijani should not require a special keyboard — or any extra software at all.
The Problem This Solves
Azerbaijani uses a Latin-based alphabet — adopted in 1991 following independence — but it includes eight characters that do not appear on any standard Latin keyboard: ə, ö, ü, ı, ğ, ç, ş and their uppercase counterparts. These characters are not exotic or optional. They are load-bearing parts of the language. Without them, words are ambiguous, sentences are incomplete, and written Azerbaijani reads as broken.
Yet millions of Azerbaijani speakers use keyboards — on phones, laptops, shared computers, international devices — that cannot produce these characters without navigating through special character menus, installing keyboard layouts, or awkwardly copying and pasting from character maps. In practice, most people simply omit the special characters. The result is Azerbaijani text that is technically readable but orthographically incorrect, a shorthand born of inconvenience rather than choice.
Yaz.Az removes that friction. You type using the keyboard you already have. You use short, memorable sequences — sh for ş, ae for ə, gh for ğ — and the tool converts your text in one click. No installation. No account. No settings to configure.
The Azerbaijani Language
Azerbaijani (Azərbaycan dili) is a Turkic language spoken by approximately 35–50 million people, predominantly in Azerbaijan and the northwestern regions of Iran, as well as diaspora communities across Russia, Georgia, Turkey, and Western Europe. It is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan and one of the most widely spoken Turkic languages in the world.
The language has undergone significant script changes over the past century: Arabic script until the 1920s, a Latin-based script in the 1920s–30s, Cyrillic under Soviet rule until 1991, and then a return to a revised Latin script following independence. This history of script transitions means that many older Azerbaijani speakers grew up with Cyrillic, while younger generations were educated in Latin — a generational divide that makes digital literacy tools like Yaz.Az particularly relevant.
The special characters that distinguish Azerbaijani from generic Latin are not decorative. They mark phonemic distinctions that are essential to meaning. The dotless ı, for example, is a different vowel from dotted i. The schwa ə represents a sound closer to the open mid-front vowel, completely absent from English. Getting these characters right matters.
The Characters
Yaz.Az handles all eight non-standard Azerbaijani characters. Here is what each one sounds like and how you type it:
How It Works
The transliteration engine is entirely client-side JavaScript. When you click Convert, the tool scans your text left to right, matching the longest known input sequence first. This approach — called greedy longest-match — ensures that two-character sequences like sh are captured before a lone s, preventing partial matches.
The mapping rules are stored in a single configuration object in the source code, separate from the application logic. This means the rules can be adjusted, extended, or refined without touching the rest of the program — an important design choice, because Azerbaijani transliteration conventions are not universally standardised and may need tuning based on real-world usage.
One deliberate design decision: bare e is never automatically converted to ə. This prevents unwanted substitutions in Latin loanwords and proper nouns (email, internet, and so on). The user must explicitly type ae or e' to produce ə. This keeps the tool predictable and trustworthy.
Privacy by Design
Yaz.Az was designed from the ground up with privacy in mind. There is no server-side text processing. There is no logging of what you type. There is no account system. Analytics are collected only in aggregated, anonymous form using Umami — a privacy-respecting platform that uses no cookies and stores no personally identifiable information.
The privacy note on the homepage is not a legal disclaimer — it is a plain statement of technical fact: your text never leaves your browser.
Free, and Staying Free
Yaz.Az is and will remain free. Running costs are covered by unobtrusive Google AdSense advertisements, placed so they do not interrupt the core workflow. The tool itself — transliteration, virtual keyboard, all modes — will always be available without payment, registration, or any condition.
Get in Touch
If you find a transliteration error, have a suggestion for improving the character mappings, or just want to say something, you are welcome to write to info@azerbaijanikeyboard.com. Feedback from native Azerbaijani speakers is especially valuable — real-world usage always reveals edge cases that testing cannot anticipate.