In practice, the Eastern Armenian language dominates government, business, and everyday life in Armenia.

Other minority languages recognized by the Armenian government are Assyrian, Greek, and Russian.

Armenia has been the most successful of the three South Caucasian states (others being Azerbaijan and Georgia) in linguistic de-Russification after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[10] The whole area of the modern Republic of Armenia was annexed by the Russian Empire in the early 19th century.

[13] Since 1991 the situation changed radically, in concern of studying it at secondary and high school as a general subject.

In practice, almost at all educational institutions the process of teaching was performed in Armenian, even at Russian departments of colleges and universities.

All these factors brought forth changes of the language functioning structure in real time conditions.

[14] The 2001 census revealed 29,563 people with Russian as their native language, from which 14,728 were ethnic Armenians.

[13] According to The Gallup Organization's poll, 73% of Armenians in 2006 and 75% in 2007 said that they think it is very important for children in the country to learn Russian.

[19] In contrast to the last decades, the number of Armenian schools teaching English have grown gradually.

50% of Armenians think that English should be taught in public secondary schools compared to 44% preferring Russian.

By offering these programs in English, AUA strives to become accessible to qualified individuals from other countries in the region.

[17] Other foreign languages common in Armenia include French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

With 600 students, the UFAR is the largest French university in a non-French speaking country.

In the 1970s the Greek community of Armenia numbered 6,000, but many emigrated to Greece, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

[26] The Urartian language followed and was spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu that was located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern city of Van in the Armenian Highland, modern-day Turkey.

[28][29][30][31][32] It was probably spoken by the majority of the population around Lake Van and in the areas along the upper Zab valley.

[38] According to the 1897 Russian census top languages spoken in the Erivan Governorate, partially corresponding to the current territory of Armenia, were Armenian (441,000), Turkic (referred to as Tatar prior to 1918; 313,176), Kurdish (49,389), Russian (13,173), Assyrian (2,865), Ukrainian (2,682), Polish (1,385), Greek (1,323), Jewish (not specified, mostly Yiddish; 850), Tat (709), Georgian (566).