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The Azerbaijani diaspora are the communities of Azerbaijanis living outside of places of their ethnic origin: Azerbaijan and the Iranian region of Azerbaijan. The term Azerbaijani diaspora refers to the global community of ethnic Azerbaijanis.
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According to Ethnologue, there were over 1 million Azerbaijani-speakers of the north dialect in southern Dagestan, Armenia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan as of 1993. Other sources, such as national censuses, confirm the presence of Azerbaijanis throughout the former Soviet Union. The Ethnologue figures are outdated in the case of Armenia, where the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has affected the population of Azerbaijanis. Ethnologue further reports that an additional 1 million Iranian Azerbaijanis live outside Iran, but these figures most likely are a reference to the Iraqi Turkmen, a distinct though related Turkic people.
History of the Azerbaijani diaspora
The main migration of Azerbaijani people occurred at the same time of Turkic migration between the 6th and 11th centuries (the Early Middle Ages), when they spread across most of Central Asia and into Europe and the Middle East. In the following centuries the local population began to be assimilated from the emerging Azerbaijani migrants.
Organizations
The State Committee of Azerbaijan Republic on Work with Diaspora was established to handle the communication with the diaspora and to drive the creation of new societies and organizations. In 2004 the committee effected the creation of about 40 new Azerbaijani communities worldwide.