Language

In my efforts to understand Armenia and its history, I was led by various writers to the language and religion of the nation as two of its strongest bonds, along with the land itself.

In the map on the left (excerpted from a larger University of Texas linguistic map) the lighter green is the area where Armenian is spoken today (the dark green is Kurdish). In the past Armenian was spoken in large areas of what is now Turkey, but after the genocidal cleansing of those areas by the Turks in the early 1900s (see History) Armenian was spoken only in those communities which had survived, roughly corresponding with the boundaries shown here.

The Armenian alphabet was created in 405 A.D. from the ancient spoken language, as a response to the adoption of Christianity in 301 A.D. as the national religion.

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