The Armenian Alphabet: All 39 Letters With Pronunciation

Where it came from

Most alphabets drift into being over centuries. Armenian did not. Around 405 AD a monk and scholar named Mesrop Mashtots designed one, deliberately, with the backing of Catholicos Sahak Partev and King Vramshapuh.

The reason was practical. Armenia had adopted Christianity in 301 AD, but scripture was read in Greek and Syriac, languages ordinary Armenians did not speak, and the country was being pulled apart between the Persian and Byzantine empires. A written Armenian meant the church could teach in the language people actually used, and it meant the culture had something that could not be taken away.

Mashtots is still a national figure in Armenia, and there is more on his life and work here.

The first sentence translated into the new alphabet was from the Book of Proverbs: to know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding. Within a generation the Bible had been translated, schools were open, and a written literature existed where there had been none. Armenians still mark the achievement with a holiday, the Feast of the Holy Translators.

The alphabet at a glance

Capital and lowercase forms, in order, with each letter’s name.

Every letter, sound by sound

Eastern Armenian is the standard in Armenia and Iran. Western Armenian is spoken across most of the diaspora, including Los Angeles. The letters are the same in both; several of the sounds are not.

Eastern and Western, the same letters sounding different

If you learn one branch and then hear the other, this is the shift that trips people up. Six pairs of consonants swap voicing between the two.

The letters that came later

Mashtots made 36 letters, enough for every sound in the Armenian of his day. Three additions since then bring the count to 39.

Letters that are also numbers

Before Arabic numerals reached Armenia, the 36 original letters did double duty as a number system. The order is what makes it work: the first nine letters are 1 to 9, the next nine are 10 to 90, the next nine are 100 to 900, and the last nine are 1000 to 9000. You read a number by adding its letters together.

The system is still in plain sight on khachkars, church walls, manuscript pages and gravestones, which is how dates on centuries-old Armenian monuments are read.

If you are learning it

A few things that make the alphabet easier than it looks:

• One letter, one sound. There is almost no English-style guesswork. Once you know a letter, you know it everywhere it appears.
• Learn the pairs together. Several letters differ only by a puff of air, like Մ and Ք. Practising them side by side fixes both faster than learning them apart.
• Watch the word-initial rule. Ե is read “ye” at the start of a word and “e” elsewhere. Ո is read “vo” at the start and “o” elsewhere.
• Write by hand. The cursive forms differ enough from print that copying them out is what makes the shapes stick.
• Pick a branch first. Decide whether you are learning Eastern or Western and stay with it until you can read comfortably. Mixing them early is what causes most confusion.