The Armenian Alphabet: Letters, Sounds and How to Read

The Armenian alphabet has 38 letters: the 36 created by Mesrop Mashtots around 405 AD, plus Օ and Ֆ, added in the Middle Ages. Modern Eastern Armenian also treats the ligature և (yev) as a letter, which is why our chart lists 39. It is a true alphabet with capital and small letters, written left to right, and most letters have one fixed sound, so you can learn to read it in a few weeks of steady practice.

This guide uses the letters, names and sounds from our free Armenian alphabet chart, and every practice word comes from our list of the 1,825 most common Armenian words, with its rank on that list.

#What kind of script is Armenian?

Armenian is an alphabet in the same sense as English: vowels and consonants are full letters, written one after another from left to right. The shapes are its own. Our alphabet data describes it as “devised in the fifth century for this language alone”, and nothing else in use today looks like it.

The alphabet is credited to Mesrop Mashtots, a monk and scholar who created it around 405 AD so that the Bible and church texts could be written in Armenian. His alphabet had 36 letters. Two more, Օ (o) and Ֆ (f), were added in the Middle Ages, giving the 38 letters most references list today.

The order of the alphabet largely follows Greek, with Armenian-only letters slotted in: Ա (ayb), Բ (ben), Գ (gim), Դ (da), Ե (ech) run parallel to alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon. If you know the Greek alphabet, the first few letters come in a familiar order even though the shapes don’t match. Like Greek letters, Armenian letters also served as numbers: Է was 7, Ի was 20, Լ was 30, and so on up to 9,000.

#Capital and small letters

Unlike Georgian, its neighbor, Armenian has upper and lower case. Every letter on our chart comes as a pair, such as Ա ա and Բ բ, and capitals are used at the start of sentences and names, as in English. The one exception is և, which has only a small form. At the start of a sentence it is written as two letters, Եվ.

Two punctuation marks catch beginners out. The Armenian full stop is ։, which looks like a colon. And the question mark, ՞, is not written at the end of the sentence but on top of the word being asked about.

#Armenian vowels

Armenian has seven vowel letters, plus one two-letter combination for the oo sound.

Two pairs share a sound. ե and է are both e, and ո and օ are both o; the difference is that ե adds a y and ո adds a v at the start of a word. So երեկ (yesterday, #527) is ye-rek, and ոչ (no, #11) is voch.

The oo sound has no letter of its own: it is written with two letters, ո plus ւ, much as Greek writes it with ου. In modern Eastern spelling you will meet ւ (yiwn) only inside ու and inside the ligature և, as our chart notes, so read ու as a single oo.

#Armenian consonants

Fifteen consonants fall into five sets of three. In Eastern Armenian each set has a voiced sound, a sound with a puff of air, and a plain sound with no puff of air. English has no separate letter for that plain sound; it is close to the p in “spin” or the t in “stop”.

The other 15 consonants:

Note the two r’s: ռ is a strong rolled r, while ր is a lighter r. Our chart’s names are romanized from the traditional ones, so you’ll see other spellings elsewhere, such as yech for ech or nu for now.

#Eastern and Western Armenian

Armenian has two standard forms. Eastern Armenian is the language of Armenia; Western Armenian is spoken mainly in the diaspora. They share the alphabet, but Western Armenian reads several consonants differently, and it keeps the older, classical spelling, while Armenia uses the reformed spelling of the Soviet period.

The biggest difference is in the sound families above. Where Eastern has three sounds, Western has two, and the letters swap roles:

So the same written word can sound different. բարև (hello, #345) is barev in Eastern and parev in Western. պարոն (gentleman, #56) is paron in the East and baron in the West. գիշեր (night, #78) is gisher in the East and kisher in the West.

Our chart and word list follow Eastern Armenian. If your partner speaks Western Armenian, the shapes stay the same; only some sounds change.

#Look-alike letters

Armenian’s small letters are full of shapes that look like Latin letters but aren’t. These are the ones beginners misread most:

Among the capitals, Ս looks like a Latin U and Ո like an upside-down U. A few letters do match what they look like: Լ լ is an l, and Օ օ is an o.

#The ligature և

և is a joined form of ե and ւ, read yev. On its own it is the word “and”: it is the 6th most common word on our list, right above ու (also “and”, #7). Inside a word it stands for ev or yev, and our word list shows how common it is:

A small warning about the top of the word list itself: some high-ranked entries are single letters glossed as numerals. The #1 entry, է, is glossed there as “7 in the system of Armenian numerals”, but in running text it is almost always the word “is”. Treat the one-letter entries with care.

#Read your first Armenian words

Every word here is on our most common Armenian words list. The pronunciations are Eastern.

Start with լավ, օր and սեր, then տուն and ջուր with the ու digraph. Save շնորհակալություն for last and read it syllable by syllable.

#A learning plan for the Armenian alphabet

The chart with all 39 entries is at /tools/alphabet/armenian. After it, learn vocabulary from the 1,825 most common Armenian words, each with its English meaning. When you know a few hundred, the Armenian vocabulary test estimates how many of the list’s words you know.

#Practice reading and speaking with native speakers

The Eastern and Western split is one more reason to learn from a real person: a chart can give you one pronunciation, but a speaker gives you theirs. On LangX, Armenian is one of the 182 languages you can pick, and matching runs both ways: you see people who speak Armenian and are learning a language you speak. They can hold any of your messages to correct it, corrections are unlimited on every plan, and voice messages let them hear how you read, not only how you spell. LangX has voice messages, not live calls. The free plan includes 5 new conversations a day and unlimited replies. Armenian is a smaller language on any exchange app, so finding the right partner may take a little longer than for Spanish or French.

9:41

Lucía M. Online

Today

Hold any message to correct it — corrections are the most useful thing you can send.

¿Cómo fue tu fin de semana? Cuéntame en inglés si quieres. How was your weekend? Tell me in English if you like. 09:12

Fui a la playa con mi hermana. Hacía mucho calor y yo no llevé agua. 09:14 · Read

Correction from Lucía Hacía mucho calor y yo no llevé agua. Hacía mucho calor y no llevé agua. The «yo» isn't wrong, it just sounds emphatic — like you specifically forgot. 09:15

Message in Spanish…

You can get the app here, or read how to do a language exchange first.

#More alphabet guides

Armenia’s neighbor has a unique script of its own: the Georgian alphabet has 33 letters, no capital letters, and sound families of voiced, aspirated and plain consonants much like Armenian’s. Compare the charts at /tools/alphabet/armenian and /tools/alphabet/georgian. The letter order of both largely follows the Greek alphabet. For more scripts, see the Russian alphabet, the Persian alphabet, the Arabic alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, the Korean alphabet and the Hindi alphabet, or browse all our alphabets.

#FAQ

#How many letters are in the Armenian alphabet?

38 in most references: the 36 created by Mesrop Mashtots and the two added in the Middle Ages, Օ and Ֆ. Modern Eastern Armenian also counts the ligature և as a letter, which gives 39, the number on our chart.

#Who created the Armenian alphabet?

Mesrop Mashtots, a monk and scholar, around 405 AD. It was made for the Armenian language, so that church texts could be written in it.

#Does Armenian have capital letters?

Yes. Every letter has a capital and a small form, used much as in English, at the start of sentences and names. The ligature և has only a small form.

#What is the difference between Eastern and Western Armenian pronunciation?

Mainly five pairs of consonants. Letters read b, g, d, dz and j in Eastern are read p, k, t, ts and ch in Western, and the reverse, so բարև (hello) is barev in Armenia and parev in Western Armenian.

#Is the Armenian alphabet hard to learn?

The letters are new, but most have one fixed sound, so reading is regular once you know them. The main difficulties are the look-alike small letters and the plain p, t and k sounds that English speakers tend to say with a puff of air.