Armenian is the official language of Armenia, and is spoken by 97.7% of the nationwide population. Armenian belongs to an independent branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. It is a highly inflective language, with a complicated system of declensions. It is agglutinative, rich in consonants, and has no grammatical gender. The vocabulary includes many Azerbaijani loan words. There are two main dialects: East Armenian, the official language of Armenia, and West, or Turkish, Armenian. The alphabet, patterned after Persian and Greek letters, has 38 characters. Armenian literature dates from the early 5th century ad. Yezidi is spoken by about 1% of the population; Russian and other various languages are spoken by the remaining 2%.
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This article incorporates public domain material from the CIA World Factbook document "2006 edition".
