“Educated” readers of both books and electronic texts could change that, he says. Font options in the past few years have, in fact, diversified, he adds. Today, roughly 500 Armenian fonts are actively used, Ghabuzyan estimates.

In the past, demand for Armenian fonts was relatively limited. “In Soviet times, there was only one body which was responsible for font design,” Ghabuzyan recollects, in reference to the All-Union Research Institute of Polygraphy Engineering. “They designed them for all of the alphabets in the Soviet Union, most of which were based on Cyrillic letters. Only the Armenians and Georgians had their own alphabets and the state didn’t pay much attention to creating many different fonts for us.”

“The [Institute] rejected most of the graphic drafts, breaking the anatomy of our letters. It made them less readable.”

Ghabuzyan claims that today’s Armenian fonts show the influence of Latin letters. -- the impact, no doubt, of English’s role as the dominant international language.

Cultural Revolution

But Armenia has a long history of adapting linguistically.

As the first country to adopt Christianity as a state religion, Armenia, at the beginning of the 4th century, had to solve the problem of how to disseminate the religion among its people. Church services were conducted in the Greek and Syriac languages, which ordinary people didn’t understand. The creation of an alphabet for the Armenian language, some 100 years later, enabled the religion to become truly national.

Until the start of the modern era, the Armenian alphabet used four different scripts.

Erkatagir was created in the 4th century by the inventor of the Armenian alphabet himself, the priest Mesrop Mashtots, and is used now for capital letters.