Interesting facts about the Armenian language

The ancient Armenian language probably originated around 1000 B.C., but there are no written documents from the time before Christianity was introduced. In the 7th century B.C. Armenian had displaced the older languages of historical Armenia. Around the year 406 AD, the Armenian monk and scholar Mesrop developed an alphabet with 38 letters, the capital letters of which are still in use today. In the 5th century A.D. a rich Armenian literature arose. The written language of this epoch remained the literary language until the 19th century. The spoken language developed independently during this period. 
 
The Armenian language is an Indo-Germanic language, which for a long time was regarded as an Iranian dialect, since it took over many loan words from the Iranian linguistic area (Parthian, Middle Persian, Persian). Today the Armenian language is divided into two language groups, East Armenian and West Armenian. East Armenian is the official language in Armenia and is also spoken in Iran, Georgia and Russia. West Armenian is mainly spoken by exiles in the USA and Lebanon. 
 
The total number of speakers is about 6.7 million, of which about 3 million live in Armenia today. 
 
Armenian has many hard sounding combinations of consonants. Both the Old Armenian and the New Armenian have a complicated declination system with seven cases. There is also no grammatical gender of the nouns. Before World War II, about 50 dialects were spoken in Armenia. The old complex verb forms of these different dialects were replaced by new forms requiring the use of auxiliary verbs. The subjunctive of Old Armenian no longer exists. In grammatical terms, Old Armenian had much in common with Greek, whereas New Armenian, after centuries of geographical proximity to the Ottoman Empire, has adopted some grammatical peculiarities of Turkish (e.g. post-positions instead of pre-positions). 
 
With the Armenian Express Course of Sprachenlernen24 you will learn the most important phrases of the Armenian language. The Armenian Express Course is designed to give you the most important vocabulary for your journey. Or surprise your friends and acquaintances from Armenia with a few words of Armenian.