Armenian

Letters

Numbers

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stops	p b	t d				k ɡ
aspirated	pʰ	tʰ				kʰ
affricates		t͡s d͡z		t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
aspirated		t͡sʰ		t͡ʃʰ
fricatives	f v		s z	ʃ ʒ			χ ʁ	h
nasals	m		n			ŋ
approximants			l		j
trills/flaps			r ɾ

A notable feature of the Eastern phonology is the 3-way split of the plosive sounds: unvoiced, voiced, and aspirated.j The Western phonology generally maps letters to just voiced and aspirated sounds. For example, the following (simplified) mappings for the bilabial plosives show the pattern for all plosive and affricate letters:

Eastern: պ p բ b փ pʰ
Western: պ b բ pʰ փ pʰ

Tone

Armenian is not a tonal language.

Structure

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Vowel summary

In the table, 'standalone' groups the characters that have special pronunciations when word initial.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Vowel letters

The list below shows the 7 simple vowel letters with an upper and lower case form each, but see also ech_yiwn and digraph_u. Where two pronunciations are given, click on the character for more information.

The letter ը [U+0568 ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER ET] is generally used only at the start or end of a word, and so the sound ə is unwritten between consonants.d

ազդր

օ [U+0585 ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER OH] and its uppercase form are only used in classical orthography, word-initially and in some compound words.d

Vowel length

Vowel length is not marked.

Nasalisation

Nasalisation is not marked.

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels are written using ordinary vowel letters and no special arrangements.

Tones

Armenian is not a tonal language.

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Armenian vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Armenian orthography.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Lowercase graphemes are shown to the left, and uppercase on the right.

Consonant summary

A few contextual and allophonic alternatives are not shown here.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Consonant letters

The Armenian block has 31 consonant letters, each of which has an upper- and lowercase form.

Pronunciations of many of the consonants vary between eastern and western variants of Armenian.

ց [U+0581 ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER CO] and its uppercase form are only used in classical orthography, word-initially and in some compound words.^d

In reformed orthography, the letter ւ [U+0582 ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER YIWN] appears only as a component of ու.^d

Ligated forms

A number of letter pairs can create ligated forms. They include the following, of which the first is the most common.

These forms can also be written using code points in the Alphabetic Presentation Forms block, with compatibility decompositions to the relevant consonant pairs. As a general rule, however, code points in the Armenian block should be used rather than those in the Presentation Forms blocks. The font should still produce the ligations when the relevant letters appear side by side.

Vowel absence

No special mechanisms.

Onset consonants

No special mechanisms.

Final consonants

No special mechanisms.

Consonant clusters

No special mechanisms are used to indicate clusters of consonants. However, not all sequences of consonant letters are pronounced without intervening vowels, since the word-medial ə is not written.

ազդր

Consonant length

No special mechanisms.

Consonant sounds to characters

The following maps consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Armenian orthography. Click on the Unicode names to see examples. Graphemes are grouped by lowercase ( l ) or uppercase ( u ).

Deprecated characters

The characters on the left are deprecated by the Unicode Standard (the second was an encoding error). The characters on the right are recommended for use instead. See deprecated_punctuation.

The following precomposed ligated forms are included in the Unicode Standard for compatibility with legacy code pages. The Standard recommends use of the standard characters instead. The font should provide the necessary ligation.

Codepoint sequences

Given that Armenian doesn't use combining marks, there is nothing to say here. Character sequences just follow the pronounced order.

Digits

Modern Armenian uses European numeral digits. In the past, however, letters were assigned numeric values. This numbering system still persists in counter styles (see lists).

Dates

Observation: The ASCII hyphen appears to be used for ordinal numbers in dates, eg. նոյեմբերի 20-ին: On November 20

Currency

֏ [U+058F ARMENIAN DRAM SIGN] was introduced in 1995 for the new, post-independence currency.wd

Context-based shaping & positioning

Ligatures

As mentioned in ligatures, when text occurs in manuscripts fonts may commonly cause the following pairs of letters to ligate.

Tonal punctuation marks

The tonal punctuation marks described in tonalmarks and emphasis are not combining characters, but should nevertheless be positioned above the vowel they are associated with.

Due to print capabilities, it has become common to see those over a gap to the side of the letter, or as a half-spacing letter instead, however nowadays font rules can be used to achieve the overlapping effect in digital applications.

Font styling & weight

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Case & other character transforms

Armenian is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases.

The shapes of the upper and lowercase forms can differ significantly.

Grapheme clusters

Base | Modifier

Grapheme clusters can be used to segment Armenian words.

Armenian has no combining characters, but does use modifier characters for emphasis, exclamation and question marks. Those modifiers are usually positioned above a base character, but are not combining marks. The grapheme cluster definition treats each code point as a single character unit.

The following words show a variety of grapheme clusters. The 2nd and 4th contain digraphs. The 3rd contains a modifier question mark. The 4th ends with a ligated pair.

Click on the text version of these words to see more detail about the composition.

	բերան
	սուր
	հնարավո՞ր
	ուրեմն

Larger typographic units

The following may be treated as single units for word-internal line-breaking:

• The u digraph, ie. ու.
• Ligated consonant pairs, eg. մն.
• Modifiers that appear over a base letter, eg. ո՞.

Browser behaviour

Cursor movement. Move the cursor through the text.
Gecko, Blink, and WebKit browsers step through the text one code point at a time, which is equivalent to using grapheme clusters. It takes 2 steps to get past a letter with a modifier above. The movement is not affected by digraphs or ligatures.

Selection. Place the cursor next to a character and hold down shift while pressing an arrow key.
The behaviour is the same as for cursor movement.

Deletion. Forward deletion works in the same way as cursor movement. The backspace key deletes code point by code point, for all browsers.

Line-break. See this test. The CSS sets the value of the line-break property to anywhere. Change the size of the box to slowly move the line break point.
When the Gecko engine breaks a line it does not separate the components of the u digraph, nor the ligated forms. They do, however, wrap a modifier to the beginning of a line. Blink and WebKit don't keep digraphs and ligated forms together, but they wrap modifiers with their base letter.

Double-click. Double-click the mouse inside each word.
Blink and WebKit browsers will highlight a whole word in each case. Gecko, however, doesn't highlight a whole word containing a modifier – the selection needs to be manually extended to include the whole word.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

As a word-joining hyphen (miowt‛jan gic) Armenian uses - [U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS] or ‐ [U+2010 HYPHEN].

Phrase & section boundaries

Armenian uses a mixture of ASCII and Armenian punctuation.

՝ [U+055D ARMENIAN COMMA] is used more like the English colon, and ․ [U+2024 ONE DOT LEADER] functions like a semi-colon.

translation

Napoleon read the works of Corneille, Racine and Voltaire, and his favorite poet was Ossian.

translation

Expression error: unrecognized word: "etal".

Question & exclamation marks

՞␣՜

Armenian indicates questions, exclamations and emphasis by associating a modifier with a vowel in a sentence, rather than by using sentence-final punctuation.

՞ [U+055E ARMENIAN QUESTION MARK] is used for question, and is placed above and slightly to the right of the last vowel of the question word (usually the stressed vowel), rather than at the end of the sentence

translation

Is it possible to combine family and politics?

՜ [U+055C ARMENIAN EXCLAMATION MARK] is used rather than an exclamation mark.

The modifier marks should appear above and slightly to the right of the vowel being modified, however, due to mechanical difficulties in printing, fonts often put the modifier alongside the vowel instead.

Bracketed text

Armenian commonly uses ASCII parentheses to insert parenthetical information into text.

translation

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848 – May 8, 1903) was a world-renowned French Impressionist painter.

Quotations & citations

Armenian uses « [U+00AB LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK] and » [U+00BB RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK] for quote marks. ASCII quotation marks are sometimes used, but as they resemble other Armenian characters, their use is discouraged.ws

translation

The statement made at the state level states: "The news about our marshal's health being in a serious condition is also wrong and harmful for our country."

Emphasis

Armenian indicates emphasis by associating the modifier ՛ [U+055B ARMENIAN EMPHASIS MARK] with a vowel in the emphasised word – usually the last vowel.

translation

Italy was part of both the Entente and the Central Powers."

The modifier mark should appear above and slightly to the right of the vowel being modified, however, due to mechanical difficulties in printing, fonts often put the modifier alongside the vowel instead.

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

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Inline notes & annotations

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Other punctuation

Other inline text decoration

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Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken at inter-word spaces.

Text alignment & justification

The most common approach to justification relies on adjustment of spaces.d

Text spacing

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Baselines, line height, etc.

Armenian uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

To give an approximate idea, fig_baselines compares Latin and Armenian glyphs from Noto fonts. The metrics of the Armenian letters is typically the same as or very similar to the Latin metrics. Modifier glyphs poke just very slightly above the Latin ascender height.

fig_baselines_other shows similar comparisons for the Sylfaen and Calibri fonts.

Counters, lists, etc.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

The Armenian language uses 2 additive styles (one uppercase, the other lowercase).

Styling initials

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