The Armenian language is an Indo-European language that is the only language in the

Armenian branch. It is the official language of Armenia as well as the de facto Republic of
Artsakh. Historically being spoken throughout the Armenian Highlands, today, Armenian is
widely spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian is written in its own writing
system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots.

Classification and origins

Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages. It is of interest to
linguists for its distinctive phonological developments within that family. Armenian exhibits
more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of
these subgroups. Some linguists tentatively conclude that Armenian, Greek (Phrygian) and
Indo-Iranian were dialectally close to each other; within this hypothetical dialect group, Proto-
Armenian was situated between Proto-Greek (centum subgroup) and Proto-Indo-Iranian
(satem subgroup).

Armenia was a monolingual country by the 2nd century BC at the latest. Its language has a
long literary history, with a 5th-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Its
vocabulary has historically been influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly
Parthian, and to a lesser extent by Greek, Persian, and Syriac. There are two standardized
modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, with which most
contemporary dialects are mutually intelligible.

Although Armenians were known to history much earlier (for example, they were mentioned
in the 6th century BC Behistun Inscription and in Xenophon's 4th century BC history, The
Anabasis), the oldest surviving Armenian- language text is the 5th century AD Bible
translation of Mesrop Mashtots, who created the Armenian alphabet in 405, at which time it
had 36 letters. He is also credited by some with the creation of the Caucasian Albanian
alphabet. In The Anabasis, Xenophon describes many aspects of Armenian village life and
hospitality in around 401 BC. He relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to
his ear sounded like the language of the Persians.

Early contacts
W. M. Austin (1942) concluded that there was an early contact between Armenian and
Anatolian languages, based on what he considered common archaisms, such as the lack of a
feminine gender and the absence of inherited long vowels. However, unlike shared
innovations (or synapomorphies), the common retention of archaisms (or symplesiomorphy) is
not considered conclusive evidence of a period of common isolated development.

In 1985, Soviet linguist Igor M. Diakonoff noted the presence in Classical Armenian of what
he calls a "Caucasian substratum" identified by earlier scholars, consisting of loans from the
Kartvelian and Northeast Caucasian languages. Noting that Hurro-Urartian-speaking peoples
inhabited the Armenian homeland in the second millennium BC, Diakonov identifies in
Armenian a Hurro-Urartian substratum of social, cultural, and animal and plant terms such as
ałaxin "slave girl" ( ← Hurr. al(l)a(e)ḫḫenne), cov "sea" ( ← Urart. ṣûǝ "(inland) sea"), ułt
"camel" ( ← Hurr. uḷtu), and xnjor "apple(tree)" ( ← Hurr. ḫinzuri). Some of the terms he
gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, but he suggests they were
borrowed through Hurrian or Urartian. Given that these borrowings do not undergo sound
changes characteristic of the development of Armenian from Proto-Indo-European, he dates
their borrowing to a time before the written record but after the Proto-Armenian language
stage.
Loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of
Xenophon above, initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian
language. Scholars such as Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller believed that the similarities
between the two languages meant that Iranian and Armenian were the same language. The
distinctness of Armenian was recognized when philologist Heinrich Hübschmann (1875)
used the comparative method to distinguish two layers of Iranian words from the older
Armenian vocabulary. He showed that Armenian often had 2 morphemes for the one concept,
and the non-Iranian components yielded a consistent PIE pattern distinct from Iranian, and
also demonstrated that the inflectional morphology was different from that in Iranian
languages.