Armenian

Armenian forms its own branch of the Indo-European family, native to the Armenian highlands, where the Armenians are named in the Persian Behistun Inscription of the sixth century BC. Long contact with Parthian gave it a large Iranian layer of vocabulary.

Mesrop Mashtots invented the Armenian alphabet in 405, soon followed by the fifth-century Bible translation that opened the classical age of Grabar, the literary language of the Armenian Church. In the tenth century Gregory of Narek carried its religious poetry to new heights.

Under the Bagratid and Cilician kingdoms of the eleventh to fourteenth centuries two letters were added as spoken Middle Armenian entered writing. Grabar long remained the learned standard, renewed in the eighteenth century by the Mekhitarist fathers of Venice, whose press issued the first Armenian periodical in 1794.