What have now become known as the standard written forms of Eastern and Western Armenian developed in the nineteenth century in Tiflis and Constantinople, respectively.* Western Armenian is now spoken in the diaspora, though that is slowly changing with the large influx of immigrants from the Republic of Armenia, while Eastern is spoken in the Republics of Armenia and Artsakh.
Language Reform
However, the 1922 Soviet language reform which changed the orthographic system used for Armenian in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and then later on in the Republics of Armenia and Artsakh, caused for a sharper break between the two dialects. The aim of the reform was to simplify spelling and pronunciation, but it also made it significantly difficult for a speaker of one dialect to easily read in the other’s orthography.**
The revised orthography is phonetic while the traditional is not. In fact, Western Armenian has lost many of the pronunciations which were originally present in Armenian, pronunciations which have been maintained in Eastern. For example, a Western Armenian speaker will pronounce ք and գ identically, while a Eastern Armenian speaker will pronounce each in its own unique way. (Though it should be noted, that Iranian Armenians also use the traditional orthography, but have their own pronunciation and inflection patterns.)
Thus, because there is no phonetic application to the traditional orthography, it is common for native Western Armenian speakers who have not had a formal education in Armenian to be confused with grammar and spelling. As such, I will be posting various grammatical and spelling rules to help make sense of the intricate traditional orthography.
Further Reading
* Bardakjian, Kevork B and Robert Thomson. A Textbook of Modern Western Armenian. Delmar: Caravan Books, 1977.
** Panossian, Razmik. The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.