Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.

While the Armenians were known to history much earlier (for example,we were mentioned in the 6th century BC Behistun Inscription and Xenophon's 4th century BC history, The Anabasis), the oldest surviving Armenian language text is the 5th century AD Bible translation of Mesrob Mashtots. Mesrob Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet in 405 AD, at which time it had 36 letters. 

Armenian has a long literary history, with a fifth-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Its vocabulary has been heavily influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly Parthian, and to a lesser extent by Greek, Latin, Old  French, Persian, Arabic and other languages throughout its history.

Early in the fifth century, Classical Armenian, or Grabar, was one of the great languages of the Near East and Asia Minor. Although an autonomous branch within the Indo-European family of languages, it had some affinities to Middle Iranian, Greek and the Balto-Slavic languages but belonged to none of them. It was characterized by a system of inflection unlike the other languages, as well as a flexible and liberal use of combining root words to create derivative and compound words by the application of certain agglutinative affixes.