Azerbaijan education Compulsory Education

Foreign Influences on Educational System
While Azeri, the main language spoken in Azerbaijan, is the country's official language, only 89 percent of the population spoke Azeri in 1995. Three percent of the population spoke Russian, 2 percent spoke Armenian, and 6 percent spoke other languages at that time. The Azerbaijani language, part of the south-Turkic group of languages, originally was written using the Arabic script, but the Latin alphabet was introduced in 1929. Cyrillic script became compulsory in 1939 when Azerbaijan was well enmeshed in the Soviet system. After independence in 1991, the Russian language was phased out by the Azerbaijani government, and Latin was reintroduced in 1992. Nonetheless, Russian is still commonly used in urban areas such as Baku and Sumgayit and understood in most parts of the country.
By the year 2000 Azerbaijan was cooperating on a regular basis with over 30 countries in the area of higher education and had been admitted to both the Asian and Pacific Basin Regional Committee of UNESCO on higher education and UNESCO's European Regional Committee on higher education. Azerbaijan also acceded to the Conventions on Mutual Recognition of Higher Education Institution Diplomas, Scientific Titles and Degrees and Educational Programs pertaining to the countries of those two regions.
Azerbaijani educators were becoming increasingly involved with a growing number of international organizations such as the European Union, UNESCO, and the Soros Foundation, whose programs and projects provided necessary financial supports and technical assistance to Azerbaijani educators and the country's educational institutions.
About 5,000 Azerbaijani students were studying outside of Azerbaijan in about 40 countries in the second half of the 1990s. Key areas of specialization for these students were economics, international relations, business, tourism and the hotel industry, finance, the customs business, and banking. In the late 1990s students from about 50 countries were studying in Azerbaijani schools and universities, focusing in particular on law, medicine, construction, and the oil industry.