Nagorno-Karabakh is a mountainous patch of land in the South Caucasus, inside what the world map marks as Azerbaijan. For a long time most of the people who lived there were Armenians. Many of them wanted to leave Azerbaijan and join Armenia. From the late 1980s there was bitter fighting. After the Soviet Union broke up, Armenian forces held the area, and a breakaway government sat in the city that Armenians call Stepanakert and Azerbaijanis call Xankəndi (older books sometimes spell it Xankändi). Older learner dictionaries still describe it that way: not officially a country, but with its own government and president. The later, messier truth is this: war returned in 2020, and in 2023 Azerbaijan took the whole area back. The breakaway government shut down, and almost all the Armenian residents fled. So the name now points to a place with a painful story, not to a still-standing little state. English writers may also say Karabakh, or the Armenian name Artsakh. It is a political name; people on each side tell the story differently.

納戈爾諾-卡拉巴赫（新聞常簡稱納卡）。亞美尼亞人的稱呼是阿爾扎赫；這兩個名字都帶政治立場。