Armenian alphabet

• Listen to the pronunciation of the letters in Eastern Armenian^ⓘ or in Western Armenian^ⓘ.

Notes:

1. ^ Primarily used in classical orthography; after the reform used word-initially and in some compound words.
2. ^ Except in ով /ɔv/ 'who' and ովքեր /ɔvkʰer/ 'those (people)' in Eastern Armenian.
3. ^ Iranian Armenians (who speak a subbranch of Eastern Armenian) pronounce the sound represented by this letter with a retracted tongue body [ɹ̠]: post-alveolar rather than alveolar.
4. ^ In classical orthography, ու and և are considered a digraph (ո + ւ) and a ligature (ե + ւ), respectively. In reformed orthography, they are separate letters of the alphabet.
5. ^ In reformed orthography, the letter ւ appears only as a component of ու. In classical orthography, the letter usually represents /v/, except in the digraph իւ /ju/. The spelling reform in Soviet Armenia replaced իւ with the trigraph յու.
6. ^ Except in the present tense of 'to be': եմ /ɛm/ 'I am', ես /ɛs/ 'you are (sing.)', ենք /ɛnkʰ/ 'we are', եք /ɛkʰ/ 'you are (pl.)', են /ɛn/ 'they are'.
7. ^ The letter ը is generally used only at the start or end of a word, and so the sound /ə/ is typically unwritten between consonants. One exception is մըն /mən/ (Western Armenian indefinite article, when followed by a word beginning with a vowel), e.g. մէյ մըն ալ /mɛj mən ɑl/ 'one more time'.
8. ^ The ligature և has no majuscule form; when capitalized it is written as two letters Եւ (classical) or Եվ (reformed).

The word Աստուած Astuac 'God' abbreviated. Only the first and last letters, and the abbreviation mark ՟, are written.

Armenian punctuation marks outside a word:

• [ «  » ] The čakertner are used as ordinary quotation marks and they are placed like French guillemets: just above the baseline (preferably vertically centered in the middle of the x-height of Armenian lowercase letters). The computer-induced use of English-style single or double quotes (vertical, diagonal or curly forms, placed above the baseline near the M-height of uppercase or tall lowercase letters and at the same level as accents) is strongly discouraged in Armenian as they look too much like other – unrelated – Armenian punctuations.
• [ , ] The storaket is used as a comma, and placed as in English.
• [ ՝ ] The boot' (which looks like a comma-shaped reversed apostrophe) is used as a short stop, and placed in the same manner as the semicolon, to indicate a pause that is longer than that of a comma, but shorter than that of a colon; in many texts it is replaced by the single opening single quote (a 6-shaped, or mirrored 9-shaped, or descending-wedge-shaped elevated comma), or by a spacing grave accent.
• [ ․ ] The mijaket (whose single dot on the baseline looks like a Latin full stop) is used like an ordinary colon, mainly to separate two closely related (but still independent) clauses, or when a long list of items follows.
• [ ։ ] The verjaket (whose vertically stacked two dots look like a Latin colon) is used as the ordinary full stop, and placed at the end of the sentence (many texts in Armenian replace the verjaket by the Latin colon as the difference is almost invisible at low resolution for normal texts, but the difference may be visible in headings and titles as the dots are often thicker to match the same optical weight as vertical strokes of letters, the dots filling the common x-height of Armenian letters).

The following Armenian punctuation marks placed above and slightly to the right of the vowel whose tone is modified, in order to reflect intonation:

• [ ՜ ] The yerkaratsman nshan (which looks like a diagonally rising tilde) is used as an exclamation mark.
• [ ՛ ] The shesht (which looks like a non-spacing acute accent) is used as an emphasis mark.
• [ ՞ ] The hartsakan nshan is used as a question mark.

Armenian punctuation marks used inside a word:

• [ ֊ ] The yent'amna is used as the ordinary Armenian hyphen.
• [ ՟ ] The pativ was used as an Armenian abbreviation mark, and was placed on top of an abbreviated word to indicate that it was abbreviated. It is now obsolete.
• [ ՚ ] The apat'arts is used as a spacing apostrophe (which looks either like a vertical stick or wedge pointing down, or as an elevated 9-shaped comma, or as a small superscript left-to-right closing parenthesis or half ring), only in Western Armenian, to indicate elision of a vowel, usually /ə/.

The letter ւ (w) is rarely used. It is part of a digraph and it is also used in ligatures, which are the only places where ւ is used.

ISO 9985 (1996) transliterates the Armenian alphabet for modern Armenian as follows:

In the linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, slightly different systems are in use.

For about 250 years, from the early 18th century until around 1950, more than 2,000 books in the Turkish language were printed using the Armenian alphabet. Not only did Armenians read this Turkish in Armenian script, so did the non-Armenian (including the Ottoman Turkish) elite. An American correspondent in Marash in 1864 calls the alphabet "Armeno-Turkish", describing it as consisting of 31 Armenian letters and "infinitely superior" to the Arabic or Greek alphabets for rendering Turkish.[19] This Armenian script was used alongside the Arabic script on official documents of the Ottoman Empire written in Ottoman Turkish. For instance, the first novel to be written in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire was Vartan Pasha's 1851 Akabi Hikayesi, written in the Armenian script. When the Armenian Duzian family managed the Ottoman mint during the reign of Abdülmecid I, they kept records in Armenian script but in the Turkish language. From the middle of the 19th century, the Armenian alphabet was also used for books written in the Kurdish language in the Ottoman Empire.

The Armenian script was also used by Turkish-speaking assimilated Armenians between the 1840s and 1890s. Constantinople was the main center of Armenian-scripted Turkish press. This portion of the Armenian press declined in the early twentieth century but continued until the Armenian genocide of 1915.[20]

In areas inhabited by both Armenians and Assyrians, Syriac texts were occasionally written in the Armenian script, although the opposite phenomenon, Armenian texts written in Serto, the Western Syriac script, is more common.[21]

The Kipchak-speaking Armenian Christians of Podolia and Galicia used an Armenian alphabet to produce an extensive amount of literature between 1524 and 1669.[22]

The Armenian script, along with the Georgian, was used by the poet Sayat-Nova in his Armenian poems.[23]

An Armenian alphabet was an official script for the Kurdish language in 1921–1928 in Soviet Armenia.[24]

The Armenian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in version 1.0, in October 1991. It is assigned the range U+0530–058F. Five Armenian ligatures are encoded in the "Alphabetic presentation forms" block (code point range U+FB13–FB17).

On 15 June 2011, the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC) accepted the Armenian dram sign for inclusion in the future versions of the Unicode Standard and assigned a code for the sign – U+058F (֏). In 2012 the sign was finally adopted in the Armenian block of ISO and Unicode international standards.[25]

The Armenian eternity sign, since 2013, is assigned Unicode U+058D (֍ – RIGHT-FACING ARMENIAN ETERNITY SIGN) and, for its left-facing variant, U+058E (֎ – LEFT-FACING ARMENIAN ETERNITY SIGN).[26]

The standard Eastern and Western Armenian keyboards are based on the layout of the font Arasan. These keyboard layouts are mostly a phonetic transliteration of the Latin QWERTY layout and allow direct access to every character in the alphabet. Because there are more characters in the Armenian alphabet (39) than in Latin (26), some Armenian characters appear on non-alphabetic keys on a conventional QWERTY keyboard (for example, շ maps to ,).

The phonetic layout is not very performant, due to the letter frequency difference between the Armenian and English languages, although it is easier to learn and use.[27]

Eastern Armenian keyboard layout.

Western Armenian keyboard layout. It differs from the Eastern layout in that the pairs ւ–վ, բ–պ, ք–կ, and դ–տ are reversed.

• Armenian braille
• Armenian calendar
• Armenian numerals
• Classical Armenian orthography
• Georgian alphabet, a visually similiar script used in Armenia's neighbour Georgia
• Reformed Armenian orthography
• Romanization of Armenian (includes ISO 9985)

• armenian-alphabet.com Archived 2021-01-05 at the Wayback Machine – animated interactive handwritten Armenian alphabet.
• բառարան.հայ – Armenian dictionary.
• Armenian Apostolic (Orthodox) Church Library Online (in English, Armenian, and Russian)

Information on Armenian character set encoding.

Armenian Phonetic Keyboard Layout

• Phonetic Keyboard Layout for Eastern Armenian

Armenian Transliteration

• English / French script to Armenian Transliteration Hayadar.com – Online, Latin to Armenian transliteration engine.
• Latin-Armenian Transliteration Converts Latin letters into Armenian and vice versa. Supports multiple transliteration tables and spell checking.
• Transliteration schemes for the Armenian alphabet (transliteration.eki.ee)

Armenian Orthography converters

• Nayiri.com (integrated orthography converter: reformed to classical)