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Armenian Alphabet

The letters and characters of Armenian written in the Armenian script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 5,443,505 people read or write it across 8 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Armenian — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page. The Fonts column counts how many fonts include each letter, in the same order as the letters and codepoints; an accented form under a letter gets its own codepoint and count line beneath it.

How the Armenian alphabet works

Armenian has had its own alphabet since the year 405, and it is nearly a perfect fit for the language: 38 letters, each standing for one sound, every letter with a capital and a small form. The chart gives the modern Eastern Armenian of Armenia itself; the Western Armenian of the diaspora reads several letters differently. The values here are the eastern ones, and they are stable — Armenian spelling was reformed in the 1920s to follow pronunciation more closely, so what you see is close to what you say.

The consonants come in threes. For each point in the mouth there is a voiced letter, a plain one, and one with a puff of air: b–p–p', g–k–k', d–t–t', dz–ts–ts', j–ch–ch'. English ears catch the puffed row easily (they sound like English p, t, k) but the plain row is the quiet one — p, t, k with no puff at all, closer to the letters in spill, still, skill. Two r's are kept apart: Ր is a single tap of the tongue and Ռ a firm trill, and both are written faithfully.

Three vowels need watching. Ե is e inside a word but ye at the start of one, and Ո does the same trick with o and vo. The letter Ը is the faint uh (schwa) that slips between consonants — so faint that spelling often leaves it out and lets the reader supply it. Է is a second, tighter e kept apart from Ե, and Օ is a newer, purer o mostly used in borrowed words, where Ո does the everyday work.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Armenian is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Armenian in the Armenian script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.