Armenian Language

anNadine Abo Laban 900113591 Gap paper 2 (Armenian Language) Introduction The guest speaker who graced us with her presence was Alyssah Depoya, who is of Armenian origin. According to Alyssah, all pure Armenians last names end with “yan” which acts as an indicator of whether the person is of pure Armenian origin. Armenia is a mountainous country located in the South Caucasus region in Eurasia. It is bordered by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran (“Armenia”, n. d). Armenian people have a very rich and dense culture. It is one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

Armenia was also the very first country to embrace Christianity as its religion. The Armenian culture has been shaped and influenced by many other countries due to the several invasions that their people had to endure. It has been conquered by the Persians, Greeks, Mongols, Byzantines, Ottomans, Arabs, Romans and Russians. The most brutal invasion was when the Ottoman Turks took over Armenia, killing its people and leaving them to starve to death. During the Ottoman take over between 600,000 and 1. 5 million Armenians were killed, leaving this massacre to be the very first genocide of the 20th century.

Moreover, Turkey denies such a massacre having occurred and claims till this present day that death casualties were a minimum. Armenia houses a population of 3,140,000 citizens. However the total Armenian population is 5,924,320. They are wide spread over Azerbaijan, Canada, Egypt, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, France, Greece, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, united states and Syria (Lewis, 2013). Facts about the language According to my research from the Ethonologue and Wikipedia, there are 5,924,320 speakers of Armenian all over the world.

The language belongs to the Indo-European language family and has several dialects. Most linguists identify the language as a separate branch under the indo European family. You can also call the Armenian language by Armjanski Yazyk, Ena, Ermeni Dili, Ermenice, Somkhuri. Before the creation of an Armenian alphabet, the Armenians used Greek and Aramaic characters. In 405 AD, the 36 characters of the Armenian alphabet were introduced. However, during the middle ages two more characters were introduced to the already existing alphabet so they can spell out borrowed foreign words.

There are two different dialects of the Armenian languages used till this day. There is the Eastern classical Armenian, and the western, which is more commonly spoken by the people. The western dialect is mainly used outside of the republic of Armenia, whereas eastern is used both inside and outside the country. Report on the speaker’s presentation Fortunately, everything Alyssah informed us about coincided with my research. She was very entertaining and did not miss a detail about what we needed to know.