|Armenian (Հայերէն / Hayeren)| |Spoken in:||Armenia and 29 other
countries| |Total speakers:||9 million| |Official language
of:||Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh| |Regulated by:||National Academy
of Sciences of Armenia| Armenian is an Indo-European language
spoken in the Caucasus mountains and also used by the Armenian
Diaspora. It is its own independent branch of the family of the
Indo-European languages. From ancient and modern languages,
Indo-Iranian seems to be the most closely related to Armenian.
While it contains many Indo-European roots, its phonology has
been influenced by neighboring Caucasian languages, so that it
shares a three-way distinction between voiceless, voiced, and
ejective stops and fricatives. Armenian was historically split
into two vaguely-defined primary dialects: Eastern Armenian, the
form spoken in modern-day Armenia, and Western Armenian, the
form spoken by Armenians in Anatolia. After the Armenian
Genocide, the western form was primarily spoken only by those
belonging to the diaspora. T