Qashqai language  Qashqai (قاشقای ديلى, also spelled Qashqay, Kashkai, Kashkay, Qašqāʾī and Qashqa'i) is an Oghuz Turkic language spoken by the Qashqai people, an ethnic group living mainly in the Fars Province of Southern Iran. "Encyclopædia Iranica" regards Qashqai as an independent third group of dialects within the Southwestern Turkic language group. It is known to speakers as Turki. Estimates of the number of Qashqai speakers vary. "Ethnologue" gave a figure of 949,000 in 2015. The Qashqai language is closely related to Azerbaijani, also known as Azeri. However, some Qashqai varieties namely the variety spoken in the Sheshbeyli tribe share features with Turkish. In a sociopolitical sense, though, Qashqai is considered a language in its own right. Like other Turkic languages spoken in Iran, such as the Azerbaijani language, Qashqai uses a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script. The suffixes are similar to Azerbaijani. Qashqai follows common Turkic syntax features: dependent marking, head-final within unmarked phrases, free word order with SOV preferred, agglutinative.