Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mesrop Mashtots, an Armenian linguist and ecclesiastical leader, created the Armenian alphabet in 405 AD. The original alphabet contained 36 letters; two more were added in the Middle Ages, bringing the total to 38.
Estimates place the number of Armenian speakers worldwide between five and seven million. Speakers are found in Armenia itself and across diaspora communities on multiple continents.
Eastern Armenian is the official language of the Republic of Armenia and is based on the dialect of the Yerevan region, while Western Armenian developed from the dialect of Istanbul and is the main language of the Armenian diaspora. The two forms are mutually intelligible after significant exposure, though they differ considerably in phonology, morphology, and some vocabulary.
Holger Pedersen proposed in 1924 that Greek is Armenian's closest living relative, based on the number of shared vocabulary cognates. Antoine Meillet developed the Graeco-Armenian hypothesis further in 1925 and 1927, arguing the two ancestor languages had been dialects in immediate geographical proximity during the Proto-Indo-European period.
Armenian absorbed a large number of loanwords from Parthian and other Western Middle Iranian languages, which led scholars including Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller to classify it as an Iranian language. Heinrich Hübschmann corrected this in 1875 by applying the comparative method to separate Iranian borrowings from the older native Armenian vocabulary, revealing a distinct Proto-Indo-European pattern.
The oldest surviving Armenian-language text is a 5th-century translation of the Bible, produced shortly after Mesrop Mashtots introduced the alphabet in 405 AD. Inscriptions in an earlier script called Mehenagir, etched on Armenian temples, predate the alphabet but represent a different writing tradition.