Romanization of Armenian


There are various systems of romanization of the Armenian alphabet.

Transliteration systems

Hübschmann-Meillet (1913)

In linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, the commonly used transliteration is that of Hübschmann-Meillet. For aspirated consonants, Heinrich Hübschmann used the Greek rough breathing diacritic above the letter, a reversed comma combining above the letter and serves a similar purpose in Greek: t̔, ch̔, č̔, p̔, k̔. Antoine Meillet, after using the letter h in digraphs, used the same diacritic as Hübschmann but on the right of the letter, with fonts displaying either a half ring or a reversed comma. Émile Benveniste and the Revue des Études Arméniennes continued this use of the breathing mark on the side of the letter. Some authors use a combining dot above diacritic to express the aspirates: ṫ, cḣ, č̇, ṗ, k̇.
However, the computer support of these combining diacritics has been poor for long, so some documents resorted to use, as possible fallbacks, their spacing variants written after the letter instead of above it, such as the spacing dot above , or the spacing turned comma — or sometimes the spacing Greek-script rough breaking , or the spacing grave accent or ASCII backquote or even if they are too flat, or even the ASCII apostrophe-quote when there was no confusion possible.
The preferred character today is the spacing left half-ring , or the spacing turned comma , or the spacing reversed comma , with the spacing turned comma having the advantage of excellent support in many Latin fonts because it is visually identical to the left single quote.
Also, some ambiguities were not solved to work with modern vernacular Armenian, which has two dialects, both using two possible orthographies.

BGN/PCGN (1981)

uses a right single quotation mark to express aspirates, tʼ, chʼ, tsʼ, pʼ, kʼ, the opposite of the original rough breathing diacritic.
This romanization was taken up by ISO and is considered obsolete. This system is a loose transcription and is not reversible, notably for single Armenian letters romanized into digraphs .
Some Armenian letters have several romanizations, depending on their context:
  • the Armenian vowel letter Ե/ե should be romanized as ye initially or after the vowel characters Ե/ե, Է/է, Ը/ը, Ի/ի, Ո/ո, ՈՒ/ու and Օ/օ; in all other cases it should be romanized as e;
  • the Armenian vowel letter Ո/ո should be romanized as vo initially, except in the word եո where it should be romanized as ov; in all other cases it should be romanized as o;
  • the Armenian consonant letter և should be romanized yev initially, in isolation or after the vowel characters Ե/ե, Է/է, Ը/ը, Ի/ի, Ո/ո, ՈՒ/ու and Օ/օ; in all other cases it should be romanized as ev.

    ISO 9985 (1996)

ISO 9985 is the international standard for transliteration of the modern Armenian alphabet. Like with the BGN/PCGN romanization, the apostrophe is used to denote most of the aspirates.
This system is reversible because it avoids the use of digraphs and returns to the Hübschmann-Meillet.
The aspirate series is not treated consistently in ISO 9985: while p, t, c, k are romanized with an apostrophe-like mark, aspirated չ č is not, and instead its unaspirated counterpart ճ is transcribed č̣ with an underdot appearing nowhere else in the system. Note that in this scheme, č collides with the Hübschmann-Meillet transliteration.
This system is recommended for international bibliographic text interchange, where it works very well with the common ISO/IEC 8859-2 Latin encoding used in Central Europe.

ALA-LC (1997)

is largely compatible with BGN/PCGN, but returns to expressing aspirates with a left single quotation mark.
This standard changes the transliteration scheme used between Classical/Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian for the Armenian consonants represented by swapping the pairs b vs. p, g vs. k, d vs. t, dz vs. ts and ch vs. j.
In all cases, and to make this romanization less ambiguous and reversible,
  • a soft sign is inserted between two separate letters that would otherwise be interpreted as a digraph ; no prime is present in the middle of romanized digraphs zh, kh, ts, dz, gh and ch representing a single Armenian letter;
  • with the Classical Armenian orthography only, the vowel represented by e will be represented by y instead, when it is at the initial position in a name and followed by another vowel; this difficulty has disappeared in modern Armenian with the reformed orthography that changed the original Armenian letter in such case;
  • with the Classical Armenian orthography only, the vowel represented by y will be represented by h instead, when it is at the initial position of a word or of a radical in a compound word; this difficulty has disappeared in modern Armenian with the reformed orthography that changed the original Armenian letter in such case.

    ASCII-only input methods

On various Armenian websites, non-standard transliterators have appeared, which allows inputting modern Western or Eastern Armenian text using ASCII-only characters. It is not a proper transliterator but can be convenient for users that don't have Armenian keyboards.
Despite these input methods being commonly used, they do not adhere to any approved international or Armenian standard, so they are not recommended for the romanization of Armenian. Note that the input methods recognize the Latin digraphs zh, dz, gh, tw, sh, vo, ch, rr for Classic or Eastern Armenian, and zh, dz, tz, gh, vo, ch, rr for Western Armenian, but offer no way to disambiguate words where the digraphs should not be recognized.
Some Armenian letters are entered as Latin digraphs, and may also be followed by the input of an ASCII single quote but this quote does not always mean that the intended Armenian letter should be aspirated, it is also used as a vowel modifier. Due to ambiguities, texts must be corrected by entering an intermediate dummy character before entering the second Latin letter or quote, then removing the dummy character, so that the automatic input converter keeps the Armenian letters distinct.

Transliteration tables

Some Armenian letters have very different phonetic sounds between Classical or Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, so that the usage of Armenian letters is different between the two sub-branches of the language.
This is made visible in the table below by coloring transliterations specific to Classical or Eastern Armenian on green background, and those for Western Armenian on blue background. Other letters are transliterated independently of the language branch. However, cells with red background contain transliterations that are context dependent.
Note that in the table above, the last two columns refer to digraphs, not isolated letters. However the last column displays the ligature that is used in the Classical orthography only as an isolated symbol for the short Armenian word ew and its derivations in a way similar to the ampersand in the Latin script ; the same transliteration to ew or ev will be used for the letters this ligature represents, when they are used as digraphs: it used to refer to the w consonant, now it refers to the v consonant.
Armenian script also uses some other digraphs that are often written as optional ligatures, in lowercase only ; when present, these ligatures must be romanized by decomposing their component letters.