Historically, the name 'Azarbaijan' was not used for this region and it was adopted only in 1918. The country is small both in size and population (about 8 million, 1.8 million live in Baku). The dominant language is Azari-Turkish, although about a million people speak Talesh (an Indo-European language) and in some high mountain villages, some still consider Persian as their mother language.