Armenian constitutes its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family, with no close living relatives. It was long misclassified as Iranian or as a dialect of another branch due to the many loanwords it absorbed from Persian and Greek. The Armenian alphabet was created in 405 AD by the monk Mesrop Mashtots specifically to translate the Bible and spread Christianity, and it remains in use today with minor modifications. Classical Armenian (Grabar) was the literary and liturgical language for over a millennium, while modern Eastern Armenian (spoken in Armenia) and Western Armenian (preserved by diaspora communities) diverged significantly after the 19th century. The language survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915, which devastated the Western Armenian-speaking population, and today serves as a powerful symbol of national and cultural identity.
