The official language is Azerbaijani, a Turkic language, written in Azerbaijani with the Latin alphabet, which replaced the Cyrillic alphabet. There is a small Russian-speaking minority (3.5%), Lezgi (1.9%) in the north and Talish (1.8%) in the south of the country.

Obviously, as a legacy of the Soviet period, most of the Azerbaijani population speaks Russian fluently. Currently, majority of young people speak English well enough.