Armenian Alphabet & Letters

The Armenian alphabet (Հայոց այբուբեն, hayots aybuben, named after its first two letters ayb and ben) was created around 405 AD by the monk and scholar Mesrop Mashtots, so that the Bible and the liturgy could be written in Armenian. His alphabet had 36 letters, in an order that follows the Greek alphabet with letters for Armenian sounds fitted in between. Two more were added in the Middle Ages: Օ օ for the sound o, which had been spelt with a pair of letters, and Ֆ ֆ for the f of foreign words. That makes the 38 letters on this page.

Every letter has a capital and a small form (Ա ա, Բ բ, Գ գ), and the same alphabet serves both standard forms of the language, Eastern and Western Armenian. Two combinations work like extra letters. ու (ո + ւ) is how Armenian writes the vowel u: ուրախ 'happy', Ուրախ at the start of a sentence, ՈՒՐԱԽ in capitals. և is a ligature of ե + ւ, said yev or ev; on its own it is the word 'and', and in Eastern spelling it is written inside words too, as in Երևան Yerevan. Schoolbooks in Armenia list it as a letter between Ք and Օ, which is why you may read that the alphabet has 39 letters. It has no standalone capital glyph: in reformed Eastern spelling, a word starting with it is capitalised Եվ (Եվրոպա, Europe) and written ԵՎ in all capitals; in Western Armenian, its all-caps form is ԵՒ.

Armenian letters were also numbers. The first nine, Ա to Թ, stand for 1 to 9, the next nine, Ժ to Ղ, for 10 to 90, then Ճ to Ջ for 100 to 900 and Ռ to Ք for 1000 to 9000; Օ and Ֆ came too late to get values. You still meet the system in dates on old buildings and in manuscripts, and it is why 'armenian letters as numbers' is a common search. Unicode also has a handful of old two-letter ligatures such as ﬓ (մն); they belong to historical typesetting, not to everyday writing, so they are not in the grid.

Armenian letters and their sounds

Most Armenian letters write exactly one sound, so once you know the alphabet you can read a word aloud. A few pairs need care. Ե is said ye at the start of a word and e inside it (Երևան Yerevan, մեկ 'one'), while Է is always e (էջ 'page'). In the same way Ո is usually vo at the start (ոսկի voski 'gold') and o inside, while Օ is always o (օր 'day'). Ը is the short neutral vowel heard in the English 'about'. Armenian has two r's: Ռ ռ is rolled, Ր ր a single soft tap.

Armenian keeps apart three kinds of stop that English blurs: plain voiced ones (Բ b, Գ g, Դ d), sharp unaspirated ones (Պ p, Կ k, Տ t, Ծ ts, Ճ ch) and breathy aspirated ones (Փ pʰ, Ք kʰ, Թ tʰ, Ց tsʰ, Չ chʰ). Romanisation usually flattens them, so Թ and Տ both come out as t. Խ is the kh of Scottish 'loch', Ղ a throaty gh close to the French r, Ժ the zh of 'measure'.

Western Armenian reads several of these letters differently: Բ Գ Դ are said p k t, and Պ Կ Տ are said b g d, with the same swap for Ծ and Ձ (dz, ts) and for Ճ and Ջ (j, ch). That is why the same name Պետրոս is Petros in Yerevan and Bedros in Beirut. Watch the look-alikes when copying: Armenian Ս looks like Latin U, Օ like O, small ո like n, ս like u and հ like h, but they are different characters, and a word that mixes them with Latin letters breaks search and spell-check.

Armenian punctuation marks: ։ ՞ ՜ ՛ ՝ and « »

Armenian ends a sentence not with a dot but with the verjaket ։ (U+0589), which looks like a colon: Ես հայ եմ։ 'I am Armenian.' Many people type a plain colon : instead, because it looks almost the same, but the real ։ is a separate character. The mijaket, a single raised dot ․, marks a pause longer than a comma and also introduces lists and explanations, much as an English colon does; Unicode has no Armenian character for it and recommends the one dot leader (U+2024). The everyday comma is the ordinary ,, while the but ՝, which Unicode calls ARMENIAN COMMA, sets off an explanation or marks a word that has been left out.

Three marks sit on a word rather than at the end of the sentence: they go over the stressed vowel of the word they belong to. The question mark ՞ (hartsakan): Ինչպե՞ս ես։ 'How are you?', Ո՞վ է։ 'Who is it?'. The exclamation mark ՜ (batsakanchakan): Ա՜խ 'Ah!'. The emphasis mark ՛ (shesht), used for commands and for stressing a word: Կանգնի՛ր։ 'Stop!'. In chats and on social media many people just put ? or ! at the end, but books, newspapers and school work use the Armenian marks.

Quotations go in « » (chakerts): «Բարև». The Armenian hyphen ֊ (entamna) joins compound words and breaks words at the end of a line, and ՚ is the Armenian apostrophe, seen mostly in Western Armenian and in poetry where a vowel is dropped.

How to type Armenian letters on a keyboard and phone

Windows: Settings, Time & language, Language & region, Add a language, Armenian; switch layouts with Windows + Space. Windows offers several Armenian layouts, among them a phonetic one that puts each letter on its English sound-alike (Ա on A, Բ on B, Դ on D, Մ on M) and a typewriter layout. Mac: System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources, add Armenian, which comes in Eastern and Western versions. Pick Western if you learned the Western pronunciation, because the phonetic keys follow the sounds.

Phones: iPhone (Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards) and Android's Gboard (Languages) both have Armenian keyboards, which include Armenian punctuation such as ։ ՞ ՜ ՛, and you can always copy the marks from this page. Windows numeric Alt codes do not reach Armenian letters. In Word on Windows, type the code and press Alt+X, for example 0531 Alt+X for Ա, 0561 Alt+X for ա, 0589 Alt+X for ։ and 058F Alt+X for ֏. In HTML use numeric references: Ա gives Ա, ա ա, ՞ ՞ and ֏ ֏.

Armenians texting in a hurry often write Armenian in Latin letters (barev, inch ka?). It works between friends, but names, signs, forms and anything public read right only in Armenian letters, which every current phone and computer can now display.

Armenian symbols: the dram sign ֏ and the eternity sign ֍

The dram is Armenia's currency, and its sign ֏ is a Դ (da, the first letter of դրամ, 'money') with two horizontal strokes, the way many currency signs cross their letter. Prices in Armenia are written 5000 ֏ or 5000 դր., and in international contexts AMD. The sign entered Unicode in 2012 at U+058F, so some older fonts still show a box instead of it.

The Armenian eternity sign ֍ and its mirror image ֎, called arevakhach ('sun cross') or haverzhutyan nshan ('sign of eternity'), is a pinwheel of curved arms that Armenians have carved for centuries on churches and on khachkars, the stone cross-slabs of Armenia. Today it is a popular Armenian symbol on jewellery, tattoos, logos and social media profiles, and it was added to Unicode in 2014 in both directions. People send it together with the flag 🇦🇲 to say 'Armenian, and proud of it'.

Where Armenian is spoken: Eastern and Western Armenian

Ethnologue estimates about 5.3 million Armenian speakers worldwide, with communities in Armenia 🇦🇲, where it is the only official language, Russia 🇷🇺, Syria 🇸🇾, Georgia 🇬🇪, Lebanon 🇱🇧 and Iran 🇮🇷, and smaller communities in Türkiye 🇹🇷, centred on Istanbul, and Cyprus 🇨🇾, where Armenian is a recognised minority language. Armenian-speaking communities are also found in the United States 🇺🇸 and France 🇫🇷. See the Armenia collection for the country's own emoji.

The language has two standard forms. Eastern Armenian is spoken in Armenia, Russia, Georgia and Iran and in Armenia is written in the spelling reformed in the 1920s. Western Armenian, the language of the communities in Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye, France and the Americas, keeps the classical spelling of Mashtots, and so do the Armenians of Iran although they speak Eastern Armenian. The difference shows in everyday words: Eastern Բարև and Երևան are Բարեւ and Երեւան in classical spelling, and the surname ending -յան (Petrosyan) is -եան (Bedrosian) in Western spelling.

Armenian forms a branch of the Indo-European family on its own, with no close sister languages. Centuries of contact have left many loanwords from Persian, and its neighbours write with alphabets of their own: Georgian, which Armenian tradition also credits to Mashtots, Russian in Cyrillic, and Greek, whose letter order Mashtots followed.