WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Armenian
Armenian gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, and there is a layout map behind it. Armenian is typed on the Armenian QWERTY layout.
Created around 405 AD and unrelated to any neighbouring script, with 39 letters written left to right. It has its own punctuation system, including a question mark placed over the stressed vowel of the word being questioned rather than at the end of the sentence. Eastern and Western Armenian differ in pronunciation and spelling while sharing the letters.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 35 distinct characters across 44 practice words
- Composition
- one character per keystroke, nothing stacks
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Armenian keyboard layout
- Armenian QWERTY
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 25 of the 35 characters its practice words use
The Armenian keyboard
Drawn from Armenian’s key map.
- left little finger
- left ring finger
- left middle finger
- left index finger
- thumb
- right index finger
- right middle finger
- right ring finger
- right little finger
Physical key labels appear above. հայերեն layout labels appear below. These three rows produce 25 of the 35 characters the practice words here use; the rest are reached with a modifier or a dead key.
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ա 33
- ր 16
- ն 14
- ե 10
- կ 10
- ո 9
- ի 7
- ղ 6
- մ 6
- տ 6
The longest practice word in this script is աշխատանք in Armenian.
The one language written in Armenian
Other writing systems
- Georgian Around 1,600 years old, unrelated to anything else, and, unusually, it has no capital letters at all.
- Greek The ancestor of both Latin and Cyrillic, in continuous use for around three thousand years.
- Gujarati Derived from Devanagari and immediately distinguishable from it by what is missing: the horizontal line along the top of the letters.
There is a written guide for this script: Armenian and Georgian: two alphabets you can nearly guess. How the Armenian and Georgian alphabets differ, and how each is typed. Two unrelated scripts on two keyboards arranged by sound, measured key by key.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.