RMarkdown and knitting in Armenian - r

Question

Thanks in advance for the help. I am trying to parametrically knit an RMD file into PDFs and HTMLs of different languages; one of them is Armenian. Knitting the Armenian version to any kind of format always produces literal UTF entities, like <U+0553><U+0578><U+0580><U+0571><U+0561><U+057C><U+0578>.
The .tex files are rendered as follows: \textless U+0553\textgreater\textless U+0578\textgreater\textless U+0580\textgreater\textless U+0571\textgreater
I have also tried using XeLaTeX and setting the main font to DejaVu Sans (i.e. latex_engine: xelatex and mainfont: DejaVu Sans), but it still knits the Armenian characters as Unicode literals.
I edited the XeTex .tex output and put in Armenian characters, and it worked fine. If Pandoc/RMD/Knitr didn't convert the characters to literals, then everything would work pefectly fine.
Even the .knit.md file already has the Unicode literals, so the problem is high up in the knitting chain, and I am not sure why this might be.
Any help would be appreciated.
Here's my minimal document (LuaLaTeX):
---
title: "Test Doc"
author: "Document"
output:
html_fragment:
section_divs: no
pdf_document:
latex_engine: lualatex
geometry: margin = 2cm
params:
lang: yes
lang: "`r switch(params$lang, CY = 'cy-GB', EN = 'en-GB', HY = 'hy-AM')`"
knit: (function(inputFile, encoding){ files <- c("cv-cy", "cv-en", "cv-hy"); langs <- c(list(lang = "CY"), list(lang = "EN"), list(lang = "HY")); i <- 1; for(f in files){ rmarkdown::render(inputFile, output_format = c("html_fragment", "pdf_document"), encoding = encoding, params = langs[i], output_file = c(paste0(dirname(inputFile), "/", print(f)), paste0(dirname(inputFile), "/", print(f)))); i <- i +1 } })
---
```
{r setup, include=FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(echo = FALSE)
lswitch <- function(lang, ...){
switch(lang, ..., stop(""))
}
```
`r lswitch(params$lang,
CY = "# Enw",
EN = "# Name",
HY = "# Անում"
)
`
Here's the pertinent section in the .log for the LuaLaTeX build:
) (d:/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/babel/babel.sty
Package: babel 2019/05/04 3.31 The Babel package
(d:/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/babel/switch.def
File: switch.def 2019/05/04 3.31 Babel switching mechanism
) (d:/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/babel/luababel.def
\l#dumylang=\language2
Package babel Info: Non-standard hyphenation setup on input line 114.
\l#nohyphenation=\language3
\l#german-x-2019-04-04=\language4
\l#ngerman-x-2019-04-04=\language5
\l#afrikaans=\language6
\l#ancientgreek=\language7
\l#ibycus=\language8
\l#arabic=\language9
\l#armenian=\language10
\l#basque=\language11
\l#belarusian=\language12
\l#bulgarian=\language13
\l#catalan=\language14
\l#pinyin=\language15
\l#churchslavonic=\language16
\l#coptic=\language17
\l#croatian=\language18
\l#czech=\language19
\l#danish=\language20
\l#dutch=\language21
\l#ukenglish=\language22
\l#usenglishmax=\language23
\l#esperanto=\language24
\l#estonian=\language25
\l#ethiopic=\language26
\l#farsi=\language27
\l#finnish=\language28
\l#french=\language29
\l#friulan=\language30
\l#galician=\language31
\l#georgian=\language32
\l#german=\language33
\l#ngerman=\language34
\l#swissgerman=\language35
\l#monogreek=\language36
\l#greek=\language37
\l#hungarian=\language38
\l#icelandic=\language39
\l#assamese=\language40
\l#bengali=\language41
\l#gujarati=\language42
\l#hindi=\language43
\l#kannada=\language44
\l#malayalam=\language45
\l#marathi=\language46
\l#oriya=\language47
\l#panjabi=\language48
\l#pali=\language49
\l#tamil=\language50
\l#telugu=\language51
\l#indonesian=\language52
\l#interlingua=\language53
\l#irish=\language54
\l#italian=\language55
\l#kurmanji=\language56
\l#latin=\language57
\l#classiclatin=\language58
\l#liturgicallatin=\language59
\l#latvian=\language60
\l#lithuanian=\language61
\l#mongolian=\language62
\l#mongolianlmc=\language63
\l#bokmal=\language64
\l#nynorsk=\language65
\l#occitan=\language66
\l#piedmontese=\language67
\l#polish=\language68
\l#portuguese=\language69
\l#romanian=\language70
\l#romansh=\language71
\l#russian=\language72
\l#sanskrit=\language73
\l#serbian=\language74
\l#serbianc=\language75
\l#slovak=\language76
\l#slovenian=\language77
\l#spanish=\language78
\l#swedish=\language79
\l#thai=\language80
\l#turkish=\language81
\l#turkmen=\language82
\l#ukrainian=\language83
\l#uppersorbian=\language84
\l#welsh=\language85
)
! Package babel Error: Unknown option `armenian'. Either you misspelled it
(babel) or the language definition file armenian.ldf was not fou
nd.
See the babel package documentation for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
...
l.533 \ExecuteOptions{\bbl#opt#main}
Session info:
R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 18363), RStudio 1.2.5019
Locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252
LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252
Package version:
base64enc_0.1.3 digest_0.6.23 evaluate_0.14 glue_1.3.1 graphics_3.6.1 grDevices_3.6.1 highr_0.8
htmltools_0.4.0 jsonlite_1.6 knitr_1.26 magrittr_1.5 markdown_1.1 methods_3.6.1 mime_0.7
Rcpp_1.0.3 rlang_0.4.2 rmarkdown_1.18 stats_3.6.1 stringi_1.4.3 stringr_1.4.0 tinytex_0.17
tools_3.6.1 utils_3.6.1 xfun_0.11 yaml_2.2.0
Pandoc version: 2.7.2