Armenian · Հայերեն

About Armenian

Language family

Indo-European (its own branch)

Where it's spoken

Armenia, with a large global diaspora

Speakers

roughly 6–7 million speakers

Armenian, like Greek and Albanian, forms its own independent branch of the Indo-European family with no close living relatives. Its alphabet was created around 405 AD by the monk Mesrop Mashtots specifically so the Bible and Christian liturgy could be translated and read in Armenian rather than Greek or Syriac, making the script central to Armenian national and religious identity ever since. A long history of empire, trade, and, in the 20th century, genocide and displacement scattered Armenian speakers into large diaspora communities across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.