Armenian Alphabet for Beginners: A Complete Guide

Every Armenian learner starts in the same place: the alphabet. Here's what you need to know before diving in.

How many letters are there?

The Armenian alphabet has 39 letters (38 base letters plus one digraph, ու, that functions as a single sound). It was created around 405 AD by the monk Mesrop Mashtots, specifically so that Armenian could be written down for the first time — it's one of the few alphabets in the world with a known inventor and a known invention date.

Is it related to other alphabets?

Not really. Armenian script isn't derived from Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, or Arabic — it's its own independent system, though Mashtots was influenced by Greek's general letter-per-sound philosophy when designing it. That independence is exactly why it looks unfamiliar at first glance, and also why, once learned, it maps so cleanly onto Armenian's actual sounds.

The good news: it's phonetic

Once you know what sound a letter makes, that sound almost never changes based on context — unlike English, where "c" can sound like "k" (cat) or "s" (cell) depending on the word. In Armenian, a letter reads the same way every time. This means that learning the alphabet isn't just step one — it's most of the battle for reading Armenian correctly.

Uppercase and lowercase

Like Latin script, Armenian has separate uppercase and lowercase forms for every letter, used the same way — capitals for the start of sentences and proper nouns. The shapes aren't always obviously related (similar to how Latin "A" and "a" don't look alike either), so both forms need to be learned together.

A practical learning order

Don't try to memorize all 39 letters in one sitting. A structured order — introducing a handful of letters at a time, reinforced with real words and audio — works far better than brute-force memorization. That's exactly how our Armenian alphabet page is built: every letter with its uppercase and lowercase form, transliteration, a tap-to-hear audio example, and a real example word, so you're never learning a symbol in isolation.

What comes after the alphabet

Once letters feel familiar, the next steps are training your ear on pronunciation — a few Armenian sounds genuinely don't exist in English — and building your first real vocabulary. If you're wondering whether any of this is harder than it looks, we cover that honestly in is Armenian hard to learn.