The language is called Armenian, or in its own words, Hayeren (Հայերեն). That sounds like a tautology until you notice what the question is really asking. Do Armenians speak some flavor of Russian? Turkish? Arabic? Persian? The answer is none of the above. Armenians speak a language that belongs to no group but its own.
A branch of one
Armenian is Indo-European, part of the same vast family as English, Greek, Hindi and Russian, but it constitutes an independent branch with no close relatives, living or dead. Greek has its branch, the Slavic languages have theirs, and Armenian sits alone on its own limb of the tree. Early European linguists actually misfiled it as an Iranian language because of its massive stock of Persian loanwords. It took until 1875 to untangle the borrowings from the native core, a story we tell in is Armenian similar to Farsi.
The practical consequence: knowing Russian, Turkish, Farsi or Arabic gets you almost nowhere with Armenian. It is not related to Russian at all beyond the deepest ancestry, and it’s not related to Turkish or Arabic even at that depth, since those belong to entirely different language families.
The alphabet that kept a nation alive
In 405 AD, the scholar-monk Mesrop Mashtots created an alphabet purpose-built for Armenian’s sounds: 36 letters originally, 39 today, written left to right and resembling nothing else on Earth. The first sentence translated with it was from the Book of Proverbs, and a translation of the Bible followed so quickly and so well that the 5th century is remembered as the language’s golden age.
It’s hard to overstate what this invention did. Through fifteen centuries of empire after empire ruling Armenian lands, the alphabet kept scripture, literature and identity in Armenian hands. Armenians treat it accordingly. There’s a monument in Armenia where the 39 letters stand carved in stone, each one a two-meter statue.
Eastern and Western Armenian
Modern Armenian comes in two standards, split by the political line that divided the homeland.
Eastern Armenian grew up on the Russian-ruled side and is today the official language of the Republic of Armenia, also spoken by the large Armenian communities of Iran and the former USSR. Western Armenian was the language of Ottoman Armenians. After the 1915 genocide destroyed its homeland communities, it survived in exile: Beirut, Aleppo, Paris, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles. The two differ in pronunciation (Eastern “barev,” Western “parev”) and some grammar, though speakers manage mutual understanding with modest effort.
The asymmetry between them is stark. Eastern Armenian has a state behind it. Western Armenian has only the diaspora, and UNESCO classifies it as definitely endangered, as each generation born abroad speaks it a little less. Keeping it alive is one of the diaspora’s quiet ongoing projects.
How many speakers, and what else do they speak?
Estimates run between 5 and 7 million speakers worldwide: around 3 million in Armenia, the rest scattered from Moscow to Glendale. Nearly all are bilingual in something. Inside Armenia, Russian is the dominant second language with English rising fast among the young. In the diaspora, Armenian typically lives alongside English, French, Spanish, Arabic or Russian as a home language.
Want to actually hear it? Start with the two words every visitor learns first, in how to say hello in Armenian. Barev covers hello. Merci, delightfully, covers thanks.