ארמנית מערבית

Western Armenian (Արեւմտահայերէն Arevmdahayerēn) is the variety of the Armenian language descending from the literary tradition of the Western Armenian (Anatolian) regions of the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 displaced ~1.5 million Western Armenian speakers from their Anatolian homeland into the Levant (Lebanon/Syria), the Americas, and Europe; today Western Armenian survives almost entirely in diaspora. Distinguished from Eastern Armenian (hy, the standard language of modern Armenia) by phonological features (devoiced stops: classical Armenian b/d/g, Eastern p/t/k, Western b/d/g/voiced; preserved classical orthography vs. Soviet-reformed spelling) and lexical/grammatical differences. UNESCO classifies as definitely endangered due to declining intergenerational transmission in diaspora.