A remarkable linguistic review from Yediay et al. 2024 written by Kroonen, Thorso and Wigman.
The link in the comments.
Armenian is currently spoken in the Republic of Armenia and by a worldwide diaspora, but it has historically formed a patchwork of dialects across large parts of Anatolia and the South Caucasus95. Its first substantial attestation is the Classical Armenian literature appearing from the 5th century CE. Traditionally, it is considered an independent branch of the Indo-European family tree96, but is frequently placed in a higher-order subgroup with Greek72,74. As previously mentioned, our new IBD analyses show that BA individuals from both Greece and Armenia are best modeled as having shared ancestry derived from a population closely related to previously unpublished MBA samples from Moldova, associated with the Late Yamnaya culture (Genetics and Strontium Supplementary Fig. S6.21; S6.42). This contrasts with, e.g., individuals associated with Italic languages, who derive their Steppe ancestry by a vector of Corded Ware and Bell Beaker individuals. These results are consistent with the assumption of a primordial Graeco-Armenian subgroup that started diverging during the middle of the 3rd millennium at the latest. And thus, the rather sudden replacement of the previously widespread Transcaucasian Kura-Araxes culture by the Trialeti culture by the end of the 3rd millennium BCE97, with certain similarities to early Mycenaean culture26, probably represents the first tangible sign in the region of an Indo-European element that can be ancestral to the Armenian branch (Anthony 2024; Lazaridis et al. 2022a).
From the Iron Age, samples with Urartian and pre-Urartian contexts show a similar proportion of ancestry associated with the western Steppe, which is consistent with the existing view that the Urartian population was multiethnic99 and multilingual100,101, and it yields support for the hypothesis that it may have contained an Armenian-speaking component102,103. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, Steppe ancestry emerges in the South Caucasus already in the MBA, with no significant later input, and it is only a marginal ancestry component in Central Anatolia. This means that the traditional hypothesis of a migration of Armenian speakers across Anatolia after 1,200 BCE11,104 is increasingly doubtful.
Many scholars have assumed a particularly close relationship between (Thraco-)Phrygian and Armenian as well94, even closer than that of Greek and Phrygian105,106. However, more recent progress in the study of Phrygian has revealed a poverty of exclusively shared features with Armenian, which makes such a hypothesis difficult to support94. Likewise, our IBD results yield no support for assuming a common migration of Armenians and Phrygians through Anatolia, but rather suggest that the shared innovations of Greek, Phrygian, and Armenian are attributable to a higher-order subgroup (or linguistic area) connected with the Late Yamnaya culture of the 3rd millennium BCE.
