Languages of Armenia - Historical Languages

Historical Languages

The first language that was recorded to be spoken in the Armenian Highland is the Hurrian language, which was spoken in the Mitanni and parts of the Armenia from around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC.

The Urartian language followed it. Urartian was spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu that was located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern town of Van, in the Armenian Highland, modern-day Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey. It was probably spoken by the majority of the population around Lake Van and in the areas along the upper Zab valley. First attested in the 9th century BCE, Urartian ceased to be written after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE, and presumably it became extinct due to the fall of Urartu. It must have been replaced by an early form of Armenian, perhaps during the period of Achaemenid Persian rule, although it is only in the fifth century CE that the first written examples of Armenian appear.

From the 7th century BC up to the 1870s, when Armenian was generally recognized as a separate branch of the Indo-European family, Armenia was considered to be part of the Persian civilization. Persian language in general and Parthian, the northwestern extinct dialect, in particular had great influence on Armenian.

Greek and Syriac were the languages of the Armenian Apostolic Church from the day of its creation (301 AD) to 405 AD, when Mesrop Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet.

According to the 1897 Russian census top languages spoken in the Erivan Governorate, roughly corresponding to the current territory of Armenia, were Armenian (441,000), Turkic (referred to as Tatar prior to 1918; 313,176), Kurdish (49,389), Russian (13,173), Assyrian (2,865), Ukrainian (2,682), Polish (1,385), Greek (1,323), Jewish (not specified, either Hebrew and/or Yiddish; 850), Georgian (566).