Armenian
Language · official in 1 country
The alphabet Mesrop Mashtots introduced in 405 AD, then with 36 letters, still writes Armenian, the sole member of its own branch of Indo-European. The language has two modern literary standards, Eastern and Western, which differ considerably but are mutually intelligible. Armenia uses the Eastern standard as its official variant.
The language on record
- Own name
- հայերեն
- ISO 639-1
- HY
- ISO 639-3
- HYE
- Script
- Armenian
- Family
- Armenian
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Armenian is official
Armenia is the only sovereign state on record. Armenian was also official in the Republic of Artsakh, and Cyprus, Hungary, Iraq, Poland and Romania recognise it as a minority language.
About Armenian
Where the letters օ and ֆ came from
Mashtots's alphabet had 36 letters. Between the 11th and 14th centuries, in Bagratid Armenia and the Kingdom of Cilicia, two more were added, օ and ֆ, bringing the total to 38. Mashtots is also credited by some with the Georgian and Caucasian Albanian alphabets.
A Soviet spelling reform of the 1920s added a letter, և, which had been a ligature, and turned the old digraph ու into a single letter. Armenia and the countries of the former Soviet Union write that way. The diaspora never adopted the reform: all Western Armenian speakers, and the Eastern Armenian speakers of Iran, keep the traditional spelling.
Why two literary standards grew apart
Classical Armenian, grabar, was the literary standard from the 5th century to the 19th, and the first Armenian periodical, Azdarar, was printed in it in 1794. In the 19th century the homeland was divided between the Russian and Ottoman empires, and Armenian life gathered in two cities, Tbilisi and Istanbul. Writers in both pushed the vernacular, ashkharhabar, as a modern literary language. Western Armenian took shape in Istanbul from the dialects migrants brought there. Eastern Armenian rested on the Yerevan dialect and was centred in Tbilisi.
Soviet Armenia made Eastern Armenian its official language, and the diaspora that formed after the Armenian genocide kept Western Armenian, which is now the medium of most Armenian schools outside Armenia. Some regard Western Armenian as a mere dialect.
What Armenian shares with its neighbours
Armenian and Greek share features of grammar and many words, and scholars disagree whether this reflects a common Graeco-Armenian subgroup or long contact. Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow modelled Pre-Armenian and Pre-Greek as a subgroup after 2500 BC. Much vocabulary came from Parthian, with smaller layers from Greek, Syriac and Persian. Igor Diakonoff argued in 1985 for a Hurro-Urartian substratum; Hrach Martirosyan rejects many of those origins, proposing that words such as arciv, 'eagle', passed from Armenian into Urartian instead.
Common questions
Questions about Armenian
Can Eastern and Western Armenian speakers understand each other?
Yes, once they are fluent in one of the standards. The two share most vocabulary and the basic rules of grammar, with differences in pronunciation, word forms and grammar. Some dialects, such as Homshetsi, are not intelligible to other speakers.
Who created the Armenian alphabet?
Mesrop Mashtots, in 405 AD. He gave it 36 letters, and two more were added in the Middle Ages.
What is grabar?
Classical Armenian, attested from the 5th century, when a Bible translation became its oldest surviving text, and used as the literary standard until the 19th century.