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The Azerbaijani government has decided that citizens cannot name their children after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, or after their favorite fruits and objects, the site of the EurasiaNet American organization writes in an article.

After years of close cooperation with Ankara, Baku has decided that it wants to help its big Turkic cousin make sure there is only one Atatürk out there. As it stands, Azerbaijan has 18 of them; several born within the past few years, according to the country's State Terminology Commission.

Commission Chairperson Sayaly Sadigova claimed that the decision to ban "unofficially" the use of Atatürk was made at Turkey's own request. However as the article notes, the Turkish foreign ministry did not respond to requests from EurasiaNet.org to confirm the report.

The article reads that Azerbaijan’s linguistic authoritarianism does not end there. The name-regulators say parents also cannot call their baby Samovar even if they are convinced that the little darling totally looks like the Russian tea boiler. All such requests have been denied, Sadigova underlines.

As the article notes, apart from providing guidelines for translations, the commission has created an advisory system on proper names, categorizing them essentially as good, bad and funny. The "good names,” color-coded in green for users’ convenience, are the names that supposedly conform to Azerbaijan's cultural and ideological values. The bad names are pretty much names associated with much-hated neighbor Armenia and are marked in red. Names that sound funny in Azeri or other languages go into the yellow, best-to-avoid category.

“Yet, despite the commission’s tireless efforts to improve the quality of Azerbaijani names, funny names remain a serious problem. Back in 2011, Sadigova complained that 10 percent of the 180,000 names reviewed by the commission do not conform to Azeri-language standards and are plain ridiculous,” the article notes.

Back in 2012 the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan adopted the "principle of traffic light," according to which it is the state agencies that determine the "trustworthy" and "forbidden" names for children that parents can choose. Armenian names were included in the "red" - forbidden - list. Also, a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences approved the draft law according to which the endings of Azerbaijani surnames will be changed from "ov" and "ev" to Turkic "lu-li", "baili", etc.

Chairman of the Committee on Culture of the Azerbaijani Parliament Nizami Jafarov, answered the question, how will the new law affect the national minorities in Azerbaijan - Lezghins, Talysh, Avars, Tats and other nations, and said: "The question is presented in such a way that anyone who considers himself an Azerbaijani, considering the fact that most indigenous peoples merged with Azerbaijanis and consider themselves Azerbaijanis, will have to change their names."