Armenian Transliteration

Multi-standard Armenian transliteration library with IPA phonemic transcription. Supports 10 canonical transliteration profiles with full type safety and 1200+ tests.

Installation

npm install armenian-transliteration

Usage

import { transliterate, createTransliterator } from "armenian-transliteration";
import { profiles } from "armenian-transliteration/profiles";

// Default: BGN/PCGN romanization
transliterate("Երևան");              // "Yerevan"
transliterate("Հայաստան");           // "Hayastan"

// ISO 9985 (reversible, with diacritics)
transliterate("Երևան", { standard: "iso-9985" });  // "Erewan"

// Hübschmann-Meillet (academic)
transliterate("Երևան", { standard: "hubschmann-meillet" });

// ALA-LC (Library of Congress, 2022)
transliterate("Երևան", { standard: "ala-lc" });          // "Erevan" (no Ye prefix)
transliterate("պատսպարան", { standard: "ala-lc" });     // "patʹsparan" (soft sign)

// Russian geographic names (Kuzmina-Tumanyan 1974)
transliterate("Երևան", { standard: "ru-geo-kt-1974" });  // "Ереван"
transliterate("Հաղպատ", { standard: "ru-geo-kt-1974" }); // "Ахпат"

// Russian geographic names (Republic of Armenia 2011)
transliterate("Գեղարքունիք", { standard: "ru-geo-ra-2011" }); // "Гехаркуник"

// Russian proper names (Vartapetyan)
transliterate("Հակոբ", { standard: "ru-proper-vartapetyan-1961" }); // "Акоб"

// Russian Cyrillic transcription for common Eastern Armenian vocabulary
transliterate("համար", { standard: "ru-phonetic-eastern" }); // "хамар"

// IPA phonemic transcription (Eastern Armenian)
transliterate("Երևան", { standard: "ipa-eastern" });  // "Jeɾevɑn"
transliterate("Տիգրան", { standard: "ipa-eastern" }); // "Tiɡɾɑn"

// IPA phonemic transcription (Standard Western Armenian) — W1 voicing collapse
transliterate("Երևան", { standard: "ipa-western" });  // "Jeɾevɑn"
transliterate("Տիգրան", { standard: "ipa-western" }); // "Dikʰɾɑn"

// Factory for repeated use
const toRussian = createTransliterator({ standard: "ru-geo-kt-1974" });
toRussian("Հայաստան");  // "Аястан"
toRussian("Երևան");     // "Ереван"

profiles["ru-geo-kt-1974"].targetLanguage; // "ru"
profiles["ru-proper-vartapetyan-1961"].domain; // "proper-names"

Supported Standards

| Standard | ID | Target | Reversible | Description | | ------------------ | -------------------- | -------- | ---------- | ----------------------------------------- | | BGN/PCGN | bgn-pcgn | Latin | No | US/UK geographic names (default) | | ISO 9985 | iso-9985 | Latin | Yes | International standard with diacritics | | Hübschmann-Meillet | hubschmann-meillet | Latin | Yes | Classical academic system | | ALA-LC | ala-lc | Latin | No | Library of Congress | | Russian Geographic KT 1974 | ru-geo-kt-1974 | Cyrillic | No | Geographic names (Kuzmina-Tumanyan 1974) | | Russian Geographic RA 2011 | ru-geo-ra-2011 | Cyrillic | No | Geographic names (Republic of Armenia 2011) | | Russian Proper Names Vartapetyan 1961 | ru-proper-vartapetyan-1961 | Cyrillic | No | Proper names: given names, surnames, geographic names | | Russian Phonetic Eastern | ru-phonetic-eastern | Cyrillic | No | Common-vocabulary Cyrillic transcription | | IPA Western | ipa-western | IPA | No | Broad phonemic (Standard Western Armenian) | | IPA Eastern | ipa-eastern | IPA | No | Broad phonemic (Standard Eastern Armenian) |

Source Notes

• BGN/PCGN is checked against the UK/PCGN 2022 validation PDF and Thomas T. Pedersen's EKI cross-table.
• ALA-LC follows the 2022 Library of Congress Armenian Romanization Table. Key rules encoded: word-initial ե → y only when followed by a vowel (Classical, note 2); word-initial յ → ḥ (note 4); soft-sign ʹ (U+02B9) for the bigrams Գհ Դզ Կհ Սհ Տս (note 3); եւ → ew Classical (note 5) vs և → ev modern ligature (note 6). The word-start եվ → eʹv soft-sign exception (note 6) has two lexical exceptions (ևեթ, ևս) and is not implemented; եվ always maps to ev. West Armenian bracketed alternates (note 1) are not emitted.
• ISO 9985 uses U+02BF (modifier letter left half ring) for aspirates, per ISO 9985:1996.
• Hübschmann-Meillet follows Pedersen's EKI cross-table (column H-M); ու → u as a digraph; aspirates use U+02BF; ը → ə (U+0259 schwa).
• ru-geo-kt-1974 follows Kuzmina-Tumanyan's 1974 instruction for Armenian SSR geographic names.
• ru-geo-ra-2011 follows the Republic of Armenia Government decision N 220-N for RA geographic names.
• ru-proper-vartapetyan-1961 follows Vartapetyan's 1961 reference for Armenian given names, surnames, and geographic names; Kazumyan 1990, Toshyan 1962, and the Armenian-Russian practical transcription article are useful secondary cross-checks, but not treated as original standard sources.
• ru-phonetic-eastern is a package profile for learner-facing common vocabulary, not an official name-transfer standard.
• IPA (ipa-eastern, ipa-western) profiles target Tier 1 broad phonemic — strict orthography → phoneme mapping. Every rule is attested in Dum-Tragut (2009) and JIPA 2024 (Seyfarth, Dolatian, Guekguezian, Kelly & Toparlak), cross-checked against Dolatian 2022 and Vaux 1998. Standard Western retains aspiration on թ ք փ ց չ (unlike Wiktionary's algorithm, which strips it — incorrectly per JIPA 2024: 447–448). Lexicalized and allophonic detail (stress placement, schwa epenthesis, regressive ղ/վ devoicing, word-final devoicing, post-nasal aspiration, suffix palatalization, Western progressive devoicing, յու → /ʏ/ glide fronting) is deferred to future narrow-phonetic profiles. See docs/LINGUISTIC_RATIONALE.md for the rule-by-rule citation table and tools/ipa-conformance/ for the Wiktionary conformance harness with annotated divergences (run via pnpm run ipa-conformance).

Profiles

Profile metadata is available from the main package and from the lighter armenian-transliteration/profiles subpath:

import {
  getProfile,
  getProfilesByTargetLanguage,
  profiles,
} from "armenian-transliteration/profiles";

getProfile("ru-proper-vartapetyan-1961").authority;
getProfilesByTargetLanguage("ru").map((profile) => profile.id);

Use language-first IDs for language-specific transfer systems. ru-geo-kt-1974 is preferred over cyr-geo-kt-1974 because Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian profiles would all use Cyrillic but would not share identical transfer rules.

API

transliterate(text, options?)

Transliterate Armenian text.

• text: string — input text (Armenian characters are transliterated, everything else passes through)
• options.standard — transliteration standard (default: "bgn-pcgn")
• options.direction — only "from-armenian" (default) is supported in 3.x; reverse transliteration is out of scope

createTransliterator(options)

Create a reusable transliterator function with fixed options. More efficient for repeated use.

listStandards()

Returns an array of all supported canonical standard IDs.

Features

• 10 canonical transliteration profiles — BGN/PCGN, ISO 9985, Hübschmann-Meillet, ALA-LC, Russian geographic KT 1974, Russian geographic RA 2011, Russian proper names Vartapetyan 1961, Russian phonetic Eastern, IPA (Western & Eastern Armenian)
• Declarative standard definitions — each standard is a data object, not imperative code
• Proper tokenizer — no temporary Unicode symbol hacks
• Case preservation — uppercase, lowercase, and title case handled correctly
• Full Unicode support — Armenian ligatures (U+FB13-FB17), punctuation, mixed scripts
• Type-safe — strict TypeScript and no any in the public implementation
• 1200+ tests — unit, per-standard, integration, edge cases, and formal model verification
• Tree-shakeable — ESM, CJS, and browser IIFE builds