Armenian culture: one alphabet, two standards and two spellings

Why Armenian has an eastern and a western standard

Armenian forms a branch of the Indo-European family on its own, and linguists once wrongly counted it as a dialect of Iranian. Britannica's entry on the language, written by the Kraków philologist Andrzej Pisowicz, puts its speakers at some 6.7 million in the early twenty-first century: about 3.4 million in Armenia, most of the rest in Georgia and Russia, and more than 100,000 in Iran. The country's own record gives a population of 2,930,450 on 1 January 2017, lower than that speaker count, and neither source reconciles the two.

For most of its written life the language had one standard, Grabar, the Armenian of the first Bible translation. It covered over the differences of speech and was used for theology, history, science and everyday business alike. The gap between writing and speaking had been visible since about the seventh century. From the eleventh century a spoken variety now called Middle Armenian was written too, and one form of it was the official language of the Cilician kingdom until the fourteenth. By the end of the eighteenth century the distance was so great that Azdarar, the first Armenian periodical, printed in Grabar in 1794, was not widely understood.

A nineteenth-century movement set out to build a modern standard that schools could teach, and it produced two. Western Armenian, once called the Armenian of Turkey, was built on the dialect of the Armenian community of Istanbul. Eastern Armenian, once called the Armenian of Russia, was built on the dialects of Yerevan and Tbilisi. Both were purged of Arabic, Persian and Turkish loanwords, which were replaced with words taken from Grabar, while the older loans from Greek, Syriac and ancient Iranian were kept as native. The two share almost the same vocabulary. Britannica still says they may be treated as two languages, because their pronunciation and grammar differ so much. Two Greek names show the sound shift: Petros and Grigor in the east are Bedros and Krikor in the west.

About fifty dialects were known before 1915, some of them mutually unintelligible, and 1915 is where Britannica ends that count: the year the Armenian population of Turkey was cut down by massacre and forced exodus. Wikipedia's account of the genocide places the survivors in three groups. About 295,000 had fled into Russian-held territory and ended up mostly in Soviet Armenia. An estimated 200,000 settled in the Middle East. About 100,000 lived on in Constantinople, where they were allowed to keep a cultural identity that Armenians elsewhere in Turkey were denied. The Istanbul standard went with the second and third groups and the emigrations that followed from them, and the republic was left with the eastern one.

How Soviet Armenia changed the Armenian spelling

The alphabet made by Mesrop Mashtots around 405 had 36 letters. Two more were added in the Middle Ages to write foreign sounds, օ for o and ֆ for f, which Wikipedia dates to the thirteenth century; Britannica counts the result as 38 letters, 31 consonants and 7 vowels. Spelling had long trailed pronunciation. Classical աւ before a consonant came to be said as o, and since the thirteenth century it has been written օ, so the classical word for 'day', awr, is now written ōr.

From 1922 to 1924 Soviet Armenia adopted a reformed spelling. It made the digraph ու and the ligature և into letters of the alphabet, placed և in the sequence before օ, reduced ւ to a part of ու, and replaced the classical իւ with the trigraph յու. It generally left the sound of each letter alone. Counted by the reformed rules, the alphabet has 39 letters.

Outside the Soviet sphere the reform was refused. All Western Armenians and the Eastern Armenians of Iran still write the classical orthography, criticise parts of the reform and allege political motives behind it. The line therefore runs through Eastern Armenian as well as between the two standards: a text from Yerevan and a text from the Armenians of Iran can share a grammar and differ in spelling, while a Western Armenian text differs from both in grammar and sound as well. Capital letters show the split as well. The ligature և has no capital form, so at the start of a sentence it is written Եւ in the classical spelling and Եվ in the reformed one.

The same republic used the alphabet for a second language in the same years. From 1921 to 1928 the Armenian script was an official script for Kurdish in Soviet Armenia, and Kurds are still named by Britannica among the small share of the population that is not Armenian, beside Russians, Ukrainians and Assyrians.

The script reached the Unicode Standard in version 1.0, in October 1991, a few weeks after the republic declared independence on 23 September 1991. The dram sign ֏ followed: the Unicode Technical Committee accepted it on 15 June 2011, and it was adopted into the ISO and Unicode standards in 2012.

What else the Armenian alphabet was used to write

For about 250 years, from the early eighteenth century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed in Armenian letters. The non-Armenian Ottoman elite read them as well as Armenians did. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 called the script "Armeno-Turkish" and found its 31 Armenian letters better suited to Turkish than the Arabic or Greek alphabets. The first novel written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire, Hovsep Vartanian's Akabi Hikayesi of 1851, was written in Armenian script. When the Duzian family ran the Ottoman mint under Abdülmecid I, it kept the records in Turkish in Armenian letters. Constantinople was the centre of an Armenian-script Turkish press, which declined in the early twentieth century and ended with the genocide of 1915.

The script went further than Istanbul. Kipchak-speaking Armenian Christians in Podolia and Galicia wrote an extensive literature in it between 1524 and 1669. From the middle of the nineteenth century books in Kurdish were printed in it in the Ottoman Empire. Where Armenians and Assyrians lived side by side, Syriac texts were sometimes written in Armenian letters, although Armenian written in Serto, the western Syriac script, turns up more often.

The letter shapes changed with the uses, and four calligraphic hands are recognised. Erkatagir, 'ironclad letters', is taken to be Mesrop's original; it filled manuscripts from the fifth century to the thirteenth and is still chosen for inscriptions. Bolorgir, a cursive invented in the tenth century, became popular in the thirteenth and has been the standard printed form since the sixteenth. Notrgir, a minuscule made for speed, was used heavily in the diaspora from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth before it moved into print. Sheghagir, a slanted hand, is the everyday form now.

The earliest dated use of the script is a dedication over the west door of the church of Saint Sarkis at Tekor, dated to the 480s from the people it names. A mid-sixth-century mosaic inscription in the chapel of St Polyeuctos in Jerusalem is the earliest surviving use outside Armenia, and a papyrus found at Fayyum in 1892, with Greek words written in Armenian letters, is now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The earliest surviving manuscripts in Armenian date from the ninth and tenth centuries.

What UNESCO lists as Armenian living heritage

Armenia ratified UNESCO's convention on intangible heritage on 18 May 2006, and by 2023 it had eight elements on the Representative List. Two further nominations were in progress in 2026.

The 2019 inscription is the one that follows straight from the script. UNESCO describes letter art as the decoration of letters and all their uses, grounded in Mashtots's principle of one letter for one sound, with ornamental scripts classed by their shapes: knots, birds, animals, people, and mythical or imaginary creatures. The letters also served as numbers, as cryptographs and as riddles, and they now turn up in handicrafts. The people UNESCO names as its bearers are artists, carpet weavers, embroiderers, sculptors, linguists, calligraphers and jewellers. Schools at every level teach it, the annual Granshan international design competition has had continuous support since 2008, and UNESCO names the Armenian Apostolic Church as central to bringing children to it.

Only one element on the list is tied by its title to a single Armenian city, the blacksmithing of Gyumri, inscribed in 2023. The rest are named for the Armenian people as a whole, which is how UNESCO describes letter art too: practised across the Armenian territory and integral to the cultural identity of Armenians.

How Armenian churches were planned and decorated

Britannica's country data records no official religion. Most believing Armenians belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church, an independent Oriental Orthodox church that Wikipedia calls the national church, and a minority belong to the Armenian Catholic Church, in communion with Rome. The conversion of the kingdom around 300, and the church's separate course after 451, are covered in Armenia's history; what they left in the built record is covered here.

Wikipedia divides classical Armenian architecture into four periods, and the first ran from the fourth century to the seventh, from the conversion of the monarchy to the Arab invasion. The early churches were simple basilicas, some with side apses. By the fifth century the central cupola cone was in wide use, and by the seventh centrally planned churches were being built with a more complex niched buttress and the radiating plan called the Hripsime type.

UNESCO dates the Cathedral of Echmiatsin to 301 to 303 and credits it to King Trdat III and Gregory the Illuminator. Its cruciform plan, with four apses and a central dome carried on four pillars, is in UNESCO's words the outstanding Armenian contribution to Christian architecture as a whole, and UNESCO traces its spread to Byzantium and on to Central and Western Europe. St Gayane, built in 630 of dressed tuff, is the earliest example UNESCO gives of a three-aisled basilica combined with a central dome. Its roof and walls were renewed in 1652, and a three-bay narthex added in 1683 became a burial place for the Catholicoses.

The paintings inside Echmiatsin span two centuries of painters named Hovnatan and Hovnatanyan. Naghash Hovnatan worked there from 1712 to 1721, and his paintings on the upper dome and a Holy Mother of God on the marble of the main apse survive. Hakob and Harutyun Hovnatanyan followed in the first half of the eighteenth century, Hovnatan Hovnatanyan in the second half, and Mkrtum and Hakob Hovnatanyan in the nineteenth.

The World Heritage List holds three Armenian properties, all cultural: Echmiatsin with the site of Zvartnots, inscribed in 2000; the monasteries of Haghpat and Sanahin, inscribed in 1996 with a second date of 2000; and Geghard with the upper Azat valley, inscribed in 2000. Eight more sites stood on the tentative list in 2026, among them the vishap stones of Tirinkatar, added in 2024, and the Areni-1 cave, added in 2026 for its evidence of prehistoric winemaking. The cross-stones went onto the intangible list in 2010, which records the carving as a living craft as well as a body of monuments.

What Armenian kitchens bake and boil

UNESCO inscribed the preparation, meaning and appearance of lavash in 2014, under a title that calls it an expression of culture in Armenia, and Britannica describes it as a soft, thin flatbread with a rough surface.

Khash is a boiled dish whose written trail goes back to the eleventh century. Its name comes from the verb khashél, 'to boil', and in its earlier form, khashoy, it appears in the writing of Grigor Magistros in the eleventh century, Mkhitar Heratsi in the twelfth and Yesayi Nchetsi in the thirteenth.

The apricot is the national fruit, and since Roman times it has carried the botanical name Prunus armeniaca, the Armenian plum. The pomegranate is associated with fertility and stands for the nation. Tan, a mix of water and soured yoghurt, is quoted in Wikipedia from encyclopedia.com as a popular drink.

Wine turns up in the archaeological record and the cultural one. The Areni-1 cave in the Arpa gorge went onto the World Heritage tentative list in 2026 for prehistoric life and winemaking, and in the same year a nomination for winemaking in the Areni community was in progress on the intangible list. The US International Trade Administration put attendance at the Yerevan Wine Days festival at around 120,000 in its guide of December 2025, about 25,000 of them from abroad. Brandy, the other drink with an Armenian name attached, is an export line and belongs to the Armenian economy.

Where Armenian music is played and recorded

The duduk is the instrument UNESCO listed first, in 2008. Its Armenian name, ծիրանափող, means 'apricot flute'. The dances are older in the record than any instrument. Rock paintings in the higher parts of Armenia from the fifth to the third millennium BC show scenes of country dancing. Yarkhushta, a martial dance named by Movses Khorenatsi, Faustus of Byzantium and Grigor Magistros, was danced by soldiers before battle: men face each other in pairs, rush forward and clap onto the palms of the dancers opposite. Kochari, a group dance, went onto the intangible list in 2017, and the performance of the epic of Sassoun in 2012.

Yerevan holds the institutions. The Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra plays in the Aram Khachaturian Concert Hall of the Yerevan Opera House, which also runs an opera season. The chamber ensembles include the Komitas Quartet, the Hover Chamber Choir, the National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia and the Serenade Orchestra, and there are smaller halls at the Yerevan State Musical Conservatory, the Komitas Chamber Music Hall and the Komitas Museum. Britannica notes the worldwide renown of Aram Khachaturian, the twentieth-century composer whose name the concert hall carries.

A good part of the music Wikipedia lists was made abroad. Şahan Arzruni, a concert pianist born in Istanbul and living in New York, has made some two dozen recordings, mostly of Armenian composers, and has two medals from the Armenian government for it. Isabel Bayrakdarian, an opera singer of Armenian descent who took a degree in biomedical engineering in Toronto, has won four Juno Awards. Zartong, a progressive folk band of the late 1970s, was based in France. Since 2014 the Naghash Ensemble has toured Europe with settings by the American-Armenian composer John Hodian of sacred poems by Mkrtich Naghash, a medieval painter, poet and priest, for three female voices with duduk, oud, dhol and piano. Inga and Anush Arshakyans, who trained at the Yerevan conservatory and began performing together in 2000, took the same folk material into rock and jazz and sang for Armenia at the Eurovision Song Contest of 2009 in Moscow.

Where Armenian film and carpet weaving began

Armenian cinema starts in the Soviet decade. Soviet Armenia, made in 1924, was the first Armenian documentary. Namus, the first Armenian silent feature, was directed by Hamo Beknazarian in 1926 from a play by Alexander Shirvanzade about two lovers promised to each other in childhood and parted when the girl's father marries her off after a breach of namus, a code of honour. Sergei Parajanov made The Color of Pomegranates in 1969. Atom Egoyan, born in Cairo, made Ararat in 2002 about the genocide of 1915, The annual Golden Apricot international film festival is one of the events Wikipedia credits with bringing visitors to Armenia.

Carpets have the longer record. Fragments dug up in Armenia go back to the seventh century BC or earlier, though no complete rug of that age has been found. Armenian has two words: karpet, used mostly for rugs without pile, and gorg, for pile carpets. Gorg first appears in a written source in an inscription of 1242 to 1243 on the wall of the Kaptavan church in Artsakh, and a carpet from the village of Banants, near Gandzak, dates from the early thirteenth century. Carpets were sorted by the animals on them: artsvagorgs with eagles, vishapagorgs with dragons, otsagorgs with serpents. Women did most of the weaving, though some known weavers in Karabakh were men and some whole families took it up. Wikipedia also records a claim, which other cultures dispute, that the Pazyryk carpet is Armenian, on the evidence of its double knot and its red cochineal dye.

Needlelace grew out of netmaking, and it was worn widely. Where lace in Europe was mostly a possession of the nobility, in Armenia it went on everything from headscarves to underwear, and making it was part of many women's lives. The National Gallery in Yerevan holds more than 16,000 works going back to the Middle Ages by the count in Wikipedia's article as revised in August 2026.

What sports Armenians play and follow

Wikipedia names football, wrestling, weightlifting, judo, chess and boxing as the popular sports, with skiing and climbing in the mountains and water sports confined to lakes such as Sevan. Armenia is a full member of UEFA and of the international bandy and ice hockey federations. Ararat Yerevan won both the Soviet Top League and the Soviet Cup in 1973.

The men's chess team has won the Chess Olympiad three times since independence, and Tigran Petrosian and Garry Kasparov are both of Armenian origin.

Sport is also one of the ways the two halves of the culture meet in person. Every four years Armenia hosts the Pan-Armenian Games, in which thousands of competitors from across the diaspora take part, and the Birthright Armenia programme brings thousands of schoolchildren and students from abroad. In the 1990s, when visitors first passed half a million a year, most were ethnic Armenians from the diaspora, and from the 2000s diaspora Armenians from Russia, the United States, Lebanon and France came in growing numbers. Those from Lebanon, France and the United States come from the communities where Britannica places Western Armenian and its classical spelling.