Today,
seven to eight million people speak Armenian. The
term Armenian can be used to refer to at least three different
varieties of the language, each with its own dialects. It can
refer to Classical Armenian (a
fifth century classical form of the language, Grabar, now maintained
by the Armenian church);
Modern Western Armenian (developed in those regions of Armenia
that are now Turkey and the variety spoken in the diaspora);
and Modern Eastern Armenian (the language of the Republic of
Armenia).
Armenian
forms an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.
Armenian is most closely related to Greek, but has many borrowed
words from such Indo-Iranian languages as Pushto and Persian.
In fact, during the very early periods of its classification,
Armenian was erroneously considered an Iranian language because
of its large number of Iranian loan words.
Two
standard dialects exist. Eastern Armenian is used in Armenia
and in enclaves in Azerbaijan and Iran. Western Armenian is
used by Armenians in Istanbul, Lebanon, Egypt, other parts of
the diaspora, and formerly in eastern Turkey. Eastern Armenian
has been influenced by two sets of Russian reforms and differs
orthographically from Western Armenian; there are also phonological
differences. Many regional dialect variations exist, e.g., Yerevan,
Tbilisi, Karabagh, Istanbul. Some local dialects are so different
from both standard forms of the language that speakers of the
standard forms have difficulty in understanding local dialects.
