Contents

Armenian language

Indo-European language

Armenian
հայերէն/հայերեն, hayeren
"Armenian language" in the Armenian alphabet
Pronunciation	[hɑjɛˈɾɛn]
Native to	Abkhazia Armenia Georgia Iran Nagorno-Karabakh Turkey
Ethnicity	Armenians
Native speakers	5.3 million[a] (2013–2021)[1]
Language family	Indo-European Armenian
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Armenian Classical Armenian Middle Armenian
Standard forms	Eastern Armenian Western Armenian
Dialects	Yerevan Homshetsi Karabakh Karin Mush Kharberd–Yerznka Shabin–Karahisar Kakavaberd Zok
Writing system	Armenian alphabet Armenian Braille
Official status
Official language in	Armenia Organisations:  Eurasian Economic Union[b]
Recognised minority language in	Cyprus[5][6]  Hungary[7]  Iraq[8]  Poland[9][10]  Romania[11]  Turkey[12][13][14][15]  Ukraine[16]
Regulated by	Armenian National Academy of Sciences (Armenia)[17] Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Western Armenian, de facto)[18][19]
Language codes
ISO 639-1	hy
ISO 639-2	arm (B) hye (T)
ISO 639-3	Variously: hye – Eastern Armenian hyw – Western Armenian xcl – Classical Armenian axm – Middle Armenian
Glottolog	arme1241
Linguasphere	57-AAA-a
The current distribution of the Armenian language in the southern Caucasus
Official language spoken by the majority   Recognized minority language   Significant number of speakers
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Armenian (endonym: հայերէն/հայերեն^[c] (hayeren), pronounced [hɑjɛˈɾɛn]) is an Indo-European language and the sole member of an independent branch of that language family. It is the native language of the Armenian people and the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian highlands, today Armenian is also widely spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian is written in its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Saint Mesrop Mashtots. The estimated number of Armenian speakers worldwide is between five and seven million.^[20][21]

History[edit]

Classification and origins[edit]

History of the Armenian language
Armenian hypothesis Proto-Armenian Classical Armenian (from 405) Middle Armenian (c. 1100 – 1700) Modern Armenian (c. 1700 – present) Eastern, Western, Homshetsi (mixed)
Armenian alphabet Romanization of Armenian
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Subgroups
Hamshenis Cherkesogai Armeno-Tats Lom people Hayhurum Zoks
Religion
Armenian Apostolic Armenian Catholic Evangelical Brotherhood Hetanism
Languages and dialects
Armenian: Eastern Zok Western Sign languages: Armenian Sign Caucasian Sign Persian: Armeno-Tat Armenian–Lom: Lomavren
Persecution
Genocide Hamidian massacres Adana massacre Anti-Armenianism Hidden Armenians
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Peoples and societies Bronze Age Anatolian peoples (Hittites) Armenians Mycenaean Greeks Indo-Iranians Iron Age Indo-Aryans Indo-Aryans Iranians Iranians East Asia Wusun Yuezhi Europe Celts Gauls Celtiberians Insular Celts Cimmerians Hellenic peoples Italic peoples Germanic peoples Paleo-Balkan/Anatolia Thracians Dacians Illyrians Paeonians Phrygians Scythians Middle Ages East Asia Tocharians Europe Albanians Balts Slavs Norsemen/Medieval Scandinavians Middle Ages Indo-Aryan Medieval India Iranian Greater Iran
Religion and mythology Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European mythology Proto-Indo-Iranian paganism Ancient Iranian religion Historical Hittite Indo-Aryan Vedic Hinduism Buddhism Jainism Sikhism Iranian Persian Zoroastrianism Kurdish Yazidism Yarsanism Scythian Ossetian Others Armenian European Paleo-Balkan (Albanian · Illyrian · Thracian · Dacian) Greek Roman Celtic Irish Scottish Breton Welsh Cornish Germanic Anglo-Saxon Continental Norse Baltic Latvian Lithuanian Slavic Practices Fire sacrifice Horse sacrifice Sati Winter solstice/Yule
Indo-European studies Scholars Marija Gimbutas J. P. Mallory Institutes Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European Publications Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture The Horse, the Wheel, and Language Journal of Indo-European Studies Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch Indo-European Etymological Dictionary
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Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages.^[22] It is of interest to linguists for its distinctive phonological changes within that family. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups. Some linguists tentatively conclude that Armenian, Greek (and Phrygian), European Albanian and Indo-Iranian were dialectally close to each other;^{[23][24][25][26][27][28]} within this hypothetical dialect group, Proto-Armenian was situated between Proto-Greek (centum subgroup) and Proto-Indo-Iranian (satem subgroup).^[27] Ronald I. Kim has noted unique morphological developments connecting Armenian to Balto-Slavic languages.^[29]

The Armenian language has a long literary history, with a 5th-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Another text translated into Armenian early on, and also in the 5th-century, was the Armenian Alexander Romance. The vocabulary of the language has historically been influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly Parthian;^[30] its derivational morphology and syntax were also affected by language contact with Parthian, but to a lesser extent.^[31] Contact with Greek, Persian, and Syriac also resulted in a number of loanwords. There are two standardized modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian (spoken mainly in Armenia) and Western Armenian (spoken originally mainly in modern-day Turkey and, since the Armenian genocide, mostly in the diaspora). The differences between them are considerable but they are mutually intelligible after significant exposure.^[32][33][34] Some subdialects such as Homshetsi are not mutually intelligible with other varieties.^[35]

Although Armenians were known to history much earlier (for example, they were mentioned in the 6th-century BC Behistun Inscription and in Xenophon's 4th century BC history, The Anabasis),^[36] the oldest surviving Armenian-language writing is etched in stone on Armenian temples and is called Mehenagir.^{[37][dubious – discuss]} The Armenian alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405, at which time it had 36 letters. He is also credited by some with the creation of the Georgian alphabet and the Caucasian Albanian alphabet.

While Armenian constitutes the sole member of the Armenian branch of the Indo-European family, Aram Kossian has suggested that the hypothetical Mushki language may have been a (now extinct) Armenic language.^[38]

Early contacts[edit]

W. M. Austin (1942) concluded^[39] that there was early contact between Armenian and Anatolian languages, based on what he considered common archaisms, such as the lack of a feminine gender and the absence of inherited long vowels. Unlike shared innovations (orsynapomorphies), the common retention of archaisms (orsymplesiomorphy) is not considered conclusive evidence of a period of common isolated development. There are words used in Armenian that are generally believed to have been borrowed from Anatolian languages, particularly from Luwian, although some researchers have identified possible Hittite loanwords as well.^[40] One notable loanword from Anatolian is Armenian xalam, "skull", cognate to Hittite ḫalanta, "head".^[41]

In 1985, the Soviet linguist Igor M. Diakonoff noted the presence in Classical Armenian of what he calls a "Caucasian substratum" identified by earlier scholars, consisting of loans from the Kartvelian and Northeast Caucasian languages.^[42] Noting that Hurro-Urartian-speaking peoples inhabited the Armenian homeland in the second millennium BC, Diakonoff identifies in Armenian a Hurro-Urartian substratum of social, cultural, and animal and plant terms such as ałaxin "slave girl" ( ← Hurr. al(l)a(e)ḫḫenne), cov "sea" ( ← Urart. ṣûǝ "(inland) sea"), ułt "camel" ( ← Hurr. uḷtu), and xnjor "apple (tree)" ( ← Hurr. ḫinzuri). Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an AkkadianorSumerian provenance, but he suggests they were borrowed through Hurrian or Urartian. Given that these borrowings do not undergo sound changes characteristic of the development of Armenian from Proto-Indo-European, he dates their borrowing to a time before the written record but after the Proto-Armenian language stage.

Contemporary linguists, such as Hrach Martirosyan, have rejected many of the Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian origins for these words and instead suggest native Armenian etymologies, leaving the possibility that these words may have been loaned into Hurro-Urartian and Caucasian languages from Armenian, and not vice versa.^[43] A notable example is arciv, meaning "eagle", believed to have been the origin of Urartian Arṣibi and Northeast Caucasian arzu. This word is derived from Proto-Indo-European *h₂r̥ǵipyós, with cognates in Sanskrit (ऋजिप्य, ṛjipyá), Avestan (ərəzifiia), and Greek (αἰγίπιος, aigípios).^[44][45] Hrach Martirosyan and Armen Petrosyan propose additional borrowed words of Armenian origin loaned into Urartian and vice versa, including grammatical words and parts of speech, such as Urartian eue ("and"), attested in the earliest Urartian texts and likely a loan from Armenian (compare to Armenian եւ yev, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁epi). Other loans from Armenian into Urartian includes personal names, toponyms, and names of deities.^{[43][46][27][47][48]}

Loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of Xenophon above, initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. Scholars such as Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller believed that the similarities between the two languages meant that Armenian belonged to the Iranian language family.^[49] The distinctness of Armenian was recognized when philologist Heinrich Hübschmann (1875)^[49][50] used the comparative method to distinguish two layers of Iranian words from the older Armenian vocabulary. He showed that Armenian often had two morphemes for one concept, that the non-Iranian components yielded a consistent Proto-Indo-European pattern distinct from Iranian, and that the inflectional morphology was different from that of Iranian languages.

Graeco-Armenian hypothesis[edit]

The hypothesis that Greek is Armenian's closest living relative originates with Holger Pedersen (1924), who noted that the number of Greek-Armenian lexical cognates is greater than that of agreements between Armenian and any other Indo-European language. Antoine Meillet (1925, 1927) further investigated morphological and phonological agreement and postulated that the parent languages of Greek and Armenian were dialects in immediate geographical proximity during the Proto-Indo-European period. Meillet's hypothesis became popular in the wake of his book Esquisse d'une histoire de la langue latine (1936). Georg Renatus Solta (1960) does not go as far as postulating a Proto-Graeco-Armenian stage, but he concludes that considering both the lexicon and morphology, Greek is clearly the dialect to be most closely related to Armenian. Eric P. Hamp (1976, 91) supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis and even anticipates a time "when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian" (meaning the postulate of a Graeco-Armenian proto-language). Armenian shares the augment and a negator derived from the set phrase in the Proto-Indo-European language *ne h₂oyu kʷid ("never anything" or "always nothing"), the representation of word-initial laryngeals by prothetic vowels, and other phonological and morphological peculiarities with Greek. Nevertheless, as Fortson (2004) comments, "by the time we reach our earliest Armenian records in the 5th century AD, the evidence of any such early kinship has been reduced to a few tantalizing pieces".

Greco-Armeno-Aryan hypothesis[edit]

Graeco-(Armeno)-Aryan is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have become divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid-3rd millennium BC. Conceivably, Proto-Armenian would have been located between Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, consistent with the fact that Armenian shares certain features only with Indo-Iranian (the satem change) but others only with Greek (s > h).

Graeco-Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo-Europeanists who believe the Indo-European homeland to be located in the Armenian Highlands, the "Armenian hypothesis".^{[51][52][53][54][55][56]} Early and strong evidence was given by Euler's 1979 examination on shared features in Greek and Sanskrit nominal flection.^[57]

Used in tandem with the Graeco-Armenian hypothesis, the Armenian language would also be included under the label Aryano-Greco-Armenic, splitting into Proto-Greek/Phrygian and "Armeno-Aryan" (ancestor of Armenian and Indo-Iranian).^[23][24]

Evolution[edit]

Classical Armenian (Arm: grabar), attested from the 5th century to the 19th century as the literary standard (up to the 11th century also as a spoken language with different varieties), was partially superseded by Middle Armenian, attested from the 12th century to the 18th century. Specialized literature prefers "Old Armenian" for grabar as a whole, and designates as "Classical" the language used in the 5th century literature, "Post-Classical" from the late 5th to 8th centuries, and "Late Grabar" that of the period covering the 8th to 11th centuries. Later, it was used mainly in religious and specialized literature, with the exception of a revival during the early modern period, when attempts were made to establish it as the language of a literary renaissance, with neoclassical inclinations, through the creation and dissemination of literature in varied genres, especially by the Mekhitarists. The first Armenian periodical, Azdarar, was published in grabar in 1794.

The classical form borrowed numerous words from Middle Iranian languages, primarily Parthian,^[58] and contains smaller inventories of loanwords from Greek,^[58] Syriac,^[58] Aramaic,^[59] Arabic,^[60] Mongol,^[61] Persian,^[62] and indigenous languages such as Urartian. An effort to modernize the language in Bagratid Armenia and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (11–14th centuries) resulted in the addition of two more characters to the alphabet ("օ" and "ֆ"), bringing the total number to 38.^[63]

The Book of LamentationsbyGregory of Narek (951–1003) is an example of the development of a literature and writing style of Old Armenian by the 10th century. In addition to elevating the literary style and vocabulary of the Armenian language by adding well above a thousand new words,^[64] through his other hymns and poems Gregory paved the way for his successors to include secular themes and vernacular language in their writings. The thematic shift from mainly religious texts to writings with secular outlooks further enhanced and enriched the vocabulary. "A Word of Wisdom", a poem by Hovhannes Sargavak devoted to a starling, legitimizes poetry devoted to nature, love, or female beauty. Gradually, the interests of the population at large were reflected in other literary works as well. Konsdantin Yerzinkatsi and several others took the unusual step of criticizing the ecclesiastic establishment and addressing the social issues of the Armenian homeland. These changes represented the nature of the literary style and syntax, but they did not constitute immense changes to the fundamentals of the grammar or the morphology of the language. Often, when writers codify a spoken dialect, other language users are then encouraged to imitate that structure through the literary device known as parallelism.^[65]

In the 19th century, the traditional Armenian homeland was once again divided. This time Eastern Armenia was conquered from Qajar Iran by the Russian Empire, while Western Armenia, containing two thirds of historical Armenia, remained under Ottoman control. The antagonistic relationship between the Russian and Ottoman empires led to creation of two separate and different environments under which Armenians lived. Halfway through the 19th century, two important concentrations of Armenian communities were further consolidated.^[66] Because of persecutions or the search for better economic opportunities, many Armenians living under Ottoman rule gradually moved to Istanbul, whereas Tbilisi became the center of Armenians living under Russian rule. These two cosmopolitan cities very soon became the primary poles of Armenian intellectual and cultural life.^[67]

The introduction of new literary forms and styles, as well as many new ideas sweeping Europe, reached Armenians living in both regions. This created an ever-growing need to elevate the vernacular, Ashkharhabar, to the dignity of a modern literary language, in contrast to the now-anachronistic Grabar. Numerous dialects existed in the traditional Armenian regions, which, different as they were, had certain morphological and phonetic features in common. On the basis of these features two major standards emerged:

• Western standard: The influx of immigrants from different parts of the traditional Armenian homeland to Istanbul crystallized the common elements of the regional dialects, paving the way for a style of writing that required a shorter and more flexible learning curve than Grabar.
• Eastern standard: The Yerevan dialect provided the primary elements of Eastern Armenian, centered in Tbilisi, Georgia. Similar to the Western Armenian variant, the Modern Eastern was in many ways more practical and accessible to the masses than Grabar.

Both centers vigorously pursued the promotion of Ashkharhabar. The proliferation of newspapers in both versions (Eastern & Western) and the development of a network of schools where modern Armenian was taught, dramatically increased the rate of literacy (in spite of the obstacles by the colonial administrators), even in remote rural areas. The emergence of literary works entirely written in the modern versions increasingly legitimized the language's existence. By the turn of the 20th century both varieties of the one modern Armenian language prevailed over Grabar and opened the path to a new and simplified grammatical structure of the language in the two different cultural spheres. Apart from several morphological, phonetic, and grammatical differences, the largely common vocabulary and generally analogous rules of grammatical fundamentals allows users of one variant to understand the other as long as they are fluent in one of the literary standards.^[68]

After World War I, the existence of the two modern versions of the same language was sanctioned even more clearly. The Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (1920–1990) used Eastern Armenian as its official language, whereas the diaspora created after the Armenian genocide preserved the Western Armenian dialect.

The two modern literary dialects, Western (originally associated with writers in the Ottoman Empire) and Eastern (originally associated with writers in the Russian Empire), removed almost all of their Turkish lexical influences in the 20th century, primarily following the Armenian genocide.^[69]

• 
  Armenian manuscript, 5th–6th centuries.
• 
  The Four Gospels, 1495, Portrait of St Mark Wellcome with Armenian inscriptions
• 
  First printed Armenian language Bible, 1666
• 
  Armenian language road sign.

Geographic distribution[edit]

In addition to Armenia and Turkey, where it is indigenous, Armenian is spoken among the diaspora. According to Ethnologue, globally there are 1.6 million Western Armenian speakers and 3.7 million Eastern Armenian speakers, totalling 5.3 million Armenian speakers.^[1]

Armenian speakers, Ethnologue (26th ed., 2023)^[d][1]

Country	Armenian speakers	Main variety
Armenia	3,000,000	Eastern
Russia	510,000	Eastern
Lebanon	340,000	Western
United States	240,000	Western
Argentina	150,000	Western
Georgia	150,000	Western
Azerbaijan	120,000	Eastern
Iran	110,000	Eastern
Turkmenistan	84,000	Western
France	70,000	Western
Iraq	70,000	Western
Turkey	67,000	Western
Uzbekistan	66,000	Western
Syria	60,000	Western
Ukraine	50,000	Western
Brazil	47,000	Western
Canada	45,000	Western
Germany	27,000	Western
Greece	20,000	Western
Kazakhstan	16,000	Western
Spain	12,000	Western
Australia	11,000	Western
Kuwait	11,000	Western
Jordan	10,000	Western

In Georgia, Armenian speakers are concentrated in Ninotsminda and Akhalkalaki districts where they represent over 90% of the population.^[70]

Status and usage[edit]

The short-lived First Republic of Armenia declared Armenian its official language. Eastern Armenian was then dominating in institutions and among the population. When Armenia was incorporated into the USSR, the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic made Eastern Armenian the language of the courts, government institutions and schools. Armenia was also russified. The current Republic of Armenia upholds the official status of the Armenian language. Eastern Armenian is the official variant used, making it the prestige variety while other variants have been excluded from national institutions. Indeed, Western Armenian is perceived by some as a mere dialect.^[71] Armenian was also official in the Republic of Artsakh. It is recognized as an official language of the Eurasian Economic Union although Russian is the working language.

Armenian (without reference to a specific variety) is officially recognized as a minority languageinCyprus,^[5][6] Hungary,^[7] Iraq,^[8] Poland,^[9][10] Romania,^[11] and Ukraine.^[16] It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Western Armenian is the language of the diaspora, it is the medium of instruction in the majority of Armenian-language schools outside Armenia.^[71] In particular, in the Samtskhe-Javakheti region of Georgia, although Armenian has no legal status, there were 144 state-funded schools in the area as of 2010 where Armenian is the main language of instruction.^[72][73] The Lebanese curriculum allows Armenian schools to teach the Armenian language as a basic language.^[74][75]InCalifornia, home to a large Armenian American community, various state government agencies provide Armenian translations of their documents: the California Department of Social Services,^[76] California Department of Motor Vehicles,^[77] California superior courts.^[78] In the city of Glendale, there are street signs in Armenian.^[79][80]

InIran, article 15 of the constitution allows the use of "regional and tribal languages" in the mass media as well as within the schools. However, these languages do not receive formal status and are not officially regulated by the authorities.^[81][82] Iranian Armenians are de facto the only non-Persian ethnic group in Iran enjoying this right. They have their own private schools, where Armenian is the medium of instruction.^[83]

Phonology[edit]

Proto-Indo-European voiceless stop consonants are aspirated in the Proto-Armenian language, one of the circumstances that is often linked to the glottalic theory, a version of which postulated that some voiceless occlusives of Proto-Indo-European were aspirated.^[84][85][86]

Stress[edit]

In Armenian, the stress falls on the last syllable unless the last syllable contains the definite article [ə]or[n], and the possessive articles ս and դ, in which case it falls on the penultimate one. For instance, [ɑχɔɾˈʒɑk], [mɑʁɑdɑˈnɔs], [ɡiˈni] but [vɑˈhɑɡən] and [ˈdɑʃtə]. Exceptions to this rule are some words with the final letter է (ե in the reformed orthography) (մի՛թէ, մի՛գուցե, ո՛րեւէ) and sometimes the ordinal numerals (վե՛ցերորդ, տա՛սներորդ, etc.), as well as նաեւ, նամանաւանդ, հիմա, այժմ, and a small number of other words.

Vowels[edit]

Eastern Armenian has six monophthongs. Each vowel phoneme in the table is represented by three symbols. The first is the sounds transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). After that appears the corresponding letter of the Armenian alphabet. The last symbol is its Latin transliteration.

• Western and other dialects may also have /ʏ, œ/.

Consonants[edit]

The following table lists the Eastern Armenian consonantal system. The occlusives and affricates have an aspirated series, commonly transcribed with a reversed apostrophe after the letter. Each phoneme in the table is represented by IPA, Armenian script and romanization.

The major phonetic difference between dialects is in the reflexes of Classical Armenian voice-onset time. The seven dialect types have the following correspondences, illustrated with the t–d series:^[90]

Correspondence in initial position

Armenian Letter	Թ	Տ	Դ
Indo-European	*t	*d	*dʰ
Karin, Sebastia	tʰ	d	dʱ
Istanbul		d
Kharberd, Middle Armenian		d	t
Malatya, SWA			tʰ
Classical Armenian, Agulis, SEA, Yerevan		t	d
Van, Artsakh		t

Morphology[edit]

Armenian corresponds with other Indo-European languages in its structure, but it shares distinctive sounds and features of its grammar with neighboring languages of the Caucasus region. The Armenian orthography is rich in combinations of consonants, but in pronunciation, this is broken up with schwas.^[91][92] Both classical Armenian and the modern spoken and literary dialects have a system of noun declension, with six or seven noun cases but no gender. In modern Armenian, the use of auxiliary verbs to show tense (comparable to will in "he will go") has generally supplanted the inflected verbs of Classical Armenian. Negative verbs are conjugated differently from positive ones (as in English "he goes" and "he does not go") in many tenses, otherwise adding only the negative չ to the positive conjugation. Grammatically, early forms of Armenian had much in common with classical Greek and Latin, but the modern language, like modern Greek, has undergone many transformations, adding some analytic features.

Noun[edit]

Armenian has no grammatical gender, not even in the pronoun, but there is a feminine suffix (-ուհի "-uhi"). For example, ուսուցիչ (usucʻičʻ, "teacher") becomes ուսուցչուհի (usucʻčʻuhi, female teacher). This suffix does not have a grammatical effect on the sentence. The nominal inflection reserves several types of inherited stem classes. Historically, nouns were declined for one of seven cases: nominative (ուղղական uġġakan), accusative (հայցական haycʻakan), locative (ներգոյական nergoyakan), genitive (սեռական seṙakan), dative (տրական trakan), ablative (բացառական bacʻaṙakan), or instrumental (գործիական gorciakan), but in the modern language, the nominative and accusative cases, as well as the dative and genitive cases, have merged.

Examples of noun declension in Eastern Armenian

Which case the direct object takes is split based on animacy (a phenomenon more generally known as differential object marking). Inanimate nouns take the nominative, while animate nouns take the dative. Additionally, animate nouns can never take the locative case.

Examples of noun declension in Western Armenian