Armenian Language

Armenian Language, Indo-European language; because of the presence of many words borrowed in ancient times from Iranian, it was long believed to be an Iranian dialect. Armenian is spoken by Armenians in Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, and in Armenian settlements elsewhere in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. Modern scholarship has firmly established it as an independent branch of the Indo-European language family, although it diverged in striking ways from the presumed parent language.

The spoken language may date back to soon after 1000 BC, though there was no written form in existence until after the introduction of Christianity, and is thought to have been introduced to Armenia by invaders from the northern Balkans.

Armenian is known to have replaced the earlier languages of the historical Armenian region (see Armenia) by at least the 7th century BC, and it may have been influenced by the languages it replaced. In 410 AD, according to tradition, Armenian acquired a 38-letter alphabet invented by St Mesrob, a monk and scholar. A literature appeared by the 5th century, the golden age of Armenian culture, and the written language of that era, called Grabar or Classical Armenian, with various changes remained the literary language until the 19th century. Meanwhile, the spoken language developed independently; many dialects appeared, not all mutually intelligible. A nationalist movement in the 19th century led to the creation of two slightly different modern literary dialects that are closer to the spoken language: Eastern or Yerevan Armenian (the official language of the Armenian republic) and Western or Turkish Armenian.

Armenian has many harsh combinations of consonants and is particularly rich in affricative sounds (such as f, h, th). Both Classical Armenian and the modern spoken and literary dialects have a complicated system of noun declension, with six or seven cases (but no grammatical gender). It is estimated that, in pre-World War II Armenia, some 50 distinct dialects were spoken. The old verb inflections in general have been replaced by modern forms that require auxiliary verbs (comparable to English “he will go”), and negative verbs are conjugated differently from positive ones are. The subjunctive, still extant in classical Armenian, is no longer used in the modern language. Grammatically, early forms of Armenian had much in common with Greek, but Modern Armenian appears, after centuries of geographical proximity, to have absorbed some grammatical influences from Turkish (for instance, postpositions instead of prepositions).