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Azerbaijani authorities have decided to make a list of permissible names, as well as review Azerbaijani surnames. These decisions reveal the challenges the country and the people living there are facing.

A member of Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences Rasim Alighuliyev said recently that the country’s Justice Ministry demanded to work out “traffic lights” of names. Thus, starting from the year-end, the names of people will fall into three categories:

The “green” group will include the names which “meet the standards of Azerbaijani national, cultural and ideological values” and will be freely permitted.

The “yellow” list will comprise the names, which “don’t sound good in foreign languages.” These will undergo some limitations.

The “red" list will embrace the banned names which sound “offensive in Azerbaijani language” or “are the names of people who carry aggression against Azerbaijani people”.

This nonsense will get legal coloring and will be applied in Azerbaijan at the yearend, according to Rasim Alighuliyev.

This is already enough to make a medical report about the psychic condition of Azerbaijani leadership. However, the current plans come to hint this is a seriously worked out political line.

It goes about another bill worked out at Ilham Aliyev’s Administration which envisages to review the surnames of Azeris as well. The bill foresees to substitute the Russian endings “ev”, “ov” for Azerbaijani “li”, “oglu”, “gil”. However, they haven’t arrived at a final decision on this yet. Being in searches for their identities everywhere in Azerbaijan, they are now discussing adoption of a common ending for all the surnames. Let’s say, the prominent representative of Aliyev’s Administration Ali Hasanov thinks as the Azerbaijani coverage on the internet ends in “az” (the first syllable of the word Azerbaijan), the same ending could be chosen for surnames as well.

Naturally, in this case Ali Hasanov will become Ali Hasanaz. And if it turns that an aggressor had the same name as him some time before, then he could substitute it for a Georgian name Badri, to become Badri Hasanaz.

But this is not the end. Some intellectual circles of Azerbaijan suggest the ending “jan” as the last syllable of the word Azerbaijan. The author of the reforms Nizami Jafarov considered this version as acceptable and he promised to discuss it. If the version is approved, Mr. Jafarov will become Jafarjan, Hasanov will turn to Hasanjan.

A question arises: what name and surname should Azerbaijan’s unchanging leader Ilham Alliyev have? If, let’s say, the ending “jan” is chosen, and “Ali" continues to be in the “red” list of the names, Aliyev could easily become Badrijan: Ilham Badrijan.

This name fully meets the standards of Azerbaijani national, cultural and ideological values and can be included into the “green” list.