Price, Massoume (2005). Iran's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook. ABC-CLIO. p. 66. ISBN 978-1-57607-993-5. "The Shah was a native Turkic speaker and wrote poetry in the Azerbaijani language."
Savory, Roger (2007). Iran Under the Safavids. Cambridge University Press. p. 213. ISBN 978-0-521-04251-2. "qizilbash normally spoke Azari brand of Turkish at court, as did the Safavid shahs themselves; lack of familiarity with the Persian language may have contributed to the decline from the pure classical standards of former times"
en.m.wikipedia.org
Zabiollah Safa (1986), "Persian Literature in the Safavid Period", The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-20094-6, pp. 948–65. P. 950: "In day-to-day affairs, the language chiefly used at the Safavid court and by the great military and political officers, as well as the religious dignitaries, was Turkish, not Persian; and the last class of persons wrote their religious works mainly in Arabic. Those who wrote in Persian were either lacking in proper tuition in this tongue, or wrote outside Iran and hence at a distance from centers where Persian was the accepted vernacular, endued with that vitality and susceptibility to skill in its use which a language can have only in places where it truly belongs."
