Surnames of Armenian origin

Turkish and Armenian were spoken as neighbouring languages for centuries. Neighbouring languages lend each other words, and these two did. This page looks at words that passed from Armenian into Turkish, and at their place in surnames, from a purely linguistic point of view.

The standard reference is Robert Dankoff’s Armenian Loanwords in Turkish, published in 1995 by Harrassowitz in the Turcologica series. According to the publisher, the Armenian elements in Turkish had not been treated comprehensively before. Dankoff uses ‘Turkish’ in a broad sense: the whole dialect continuum from the Balkans to Azerbaijan. His corpus runs to several hundred words. Several hundred more items of doubtful origin are kept out of the main list and placed in appendices. The distinction matters. Some words counted as Armenian loans are secure; others are disputed.

How is an Armenian origin established? Etymologists look at several criteria. Sound correspondences: can the Turkish form be derived from an Armenian word through regular sound changes? Chronology: is the word attested in Armenian before it appears in Turkish? Distribution: in which dialects and areas is it used? Meaning: do the senses in the two languages match? No single criterion is enough on its own.

One factor makes the work harder. Turkish and Armenian both borrowed many words from Persian and Arabic. A word found in both languages may therefore not have passed from one to the other; both may have taken it from the same third language. Borrowing also ran in the other direction, and Dankoff’s book closes with a short note on Turkish loanwords in Armenian. Deciding which way a word travelled takes care.

A large share of this vocabulary belongs to regional speech. Fewer appear in the written language and in standard dictionaries. Surnames were mostly chosen from common, widely known words, so this layer shows up in surnames only to a limited extent.

On this site a root is tagged ‘Armenian’ only when a dictionary or etymological source says so explicitly. The record names that source. Without one, the origin is left as unknown and the page is not published; nothing is guessed. Language origin is never inferred from a place name or a region. When sources disagree, the record is marked as disputed and the views are given side by side.

Dictionary entries call for one distinction. ‘Of Armenian origin’ means that the word arose in Armenian. ‘Via Armenian’ means that it arose in another language and passed into Turkish through Armenian. For some words the oldest source is Persian or Syriac, and Armenian was only a stopping point. Etymological dictionaries mark the difference by giving the source form and the intermediary language separately. The site’s root records keep the same distinction: the language field holds the immediate donor, and the older source goes into the explanation.

For that reason this overview page does not list example surnames. Where a source supports an Armenian root, the example is shown on the surname page itself, next to that source. Everything here concerns the history of words and nothing else.