Panelists

• Shushan Karapetian, PhD (University of Southern California)
• Hagop Kouloujian, PhD (University of California, Los Angeles)
• Anatolii Tokmatcev (University of California, Los Angeles)

Abstracts (listed in order of presentation)

Immigrants and War Refugees: Can Armenian HL Instruction Ignore Student Provenance?

Hagop Kouloujian, PhD

The current status of Armenian has been shaped primarily by a series of wars and the formation of diaspora communities stemming from subsequent dispersion. This is true both for its Western and Eastern standards, as well as for a number of dialects, and it may explain even the configuration of the linguistic landscape of the Armenian homeland.

Even if we set aside the crucial impact of the 1915 genocide, recent wars and the resulting cases of compelled exodus have had a significant impact on the formation and the retreat or disintegration of linguistic communities in the diaspora. They have brought and continue to bring together, mainly in Southern California, large numbers of heritage speakers from numerous geographic, sociocultural, and dialectal backgrounds. Instruction has to deal with varying combinations of students, from “new” diasporans to members of second or third diasporas (diaspora of a diaspora) who intermingle with third- or fourth-generation Americans of Armenian heritage. Many of them experience an abrupt cross-dialect contact, which, if not managed carefully and deliberately by the instructor in order to evade “dialect shame,” may drive them to forsake their heritage language and resign themselves to the uniform and relative safety of the dominant language.

This presentation will provide a survey of these events and their outcomes in heritage language instruction, covering roughly the last eight decades of post-genocide diaspora and the past half-century in particular. It will attempt a “big-picture” analysis of the current situation, considering classroom methods and, more importantly, language policies required in order to improve language retention, acquisition, and vitality.

To Learn or Not to Learn: Strategies of Language Acquisition among Armenian Repatriates after February 2022

Anatolii Tokmatcev

Armenians from the worldwide Diaspora regard the Armenian language as a key element of Armenianness. At the communal, school, and family levels, efforts to pass the language to next generations are viewed as an important step toward ethnic preservation. The Armenians in Russia are a notable exception from this trend as already in the second generation, they often lose their proficiency in Armenian. While the symbolic importance of Armenian language usually remains high, there are no expectations that one must be able to speak in any real way.

Russian military aggression against Ukraine launched in February 2022 triggered a wave of Armenian repatriates from Russia to Armenia. As schools and kindergartens offer classes in Russian and most clerks in state agencies speak Russian, not knowing Armenian has not posed practical issues in everyday life. In this situation, some Armenian repatriates have continued their previous strategy of attaching symbolic value to Armenian language without any discernible desire or effort to turn it into practical proficiency. Others, however, have embraced the unique opportunity and started to learn or improve their Armenian, sent their children to Armenian kindergartens and schools, and tried to use Armenian as a communication tool in everyday life. This presentation is based on the interviews with recent Armenian repatriates, which focused on several research questions: 1) What factors affected the choice of a practical attitude towards Armenian language among repatriates? and 2) What factors facilitated or impeded the improvement of Armenian?

Performing Diasporic Resistance: (Re)Claiming the Heritage Language

Shushan Karapetian, PhD

The 44 Day Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh War in 2020 set in motion unprecedented transnational mobilization of the global Armenian diaspora, channeling narratives of existential angst and pan-Armenian activism. This war period witnessed disparate and extraordinary endeavors, both individual and collective, including material assistance (remittances, medical and professional aid, fund-raising, investment in reconstruction), political advocacy (lobbying, diplomacy, protesting in local communities), and global conflict infopolitics (transnational competition for the production of knowledge about the conflict via social media platforms). Mobilization witnessed surprising rates of participation by all sectors of the diaspora, including the striking involvement of the previously unengaged or “assimilated people whose names end in ian/yan.” In response to experiences of (second hand) trauma, helplessness, impotence, and survivor’s guilt in the context of war, many in the diaspora asserted agency through claiming their heritage language and the desire to (re)learn it. This manifested in various institutions and organizations being bombarded with requests for language classes and resources and the appearance and proliferation of all kinds of digital language platforms in/for Armenian.

This presentation will explore how claiming the heritage language by diaspora Armenians may have functioned as a mode of resistance in response to the following research questions: What modes of engaging with the heritage language manifested during and after the 2020 war? What role did the pandemic play in setting the stage with access to digital platforms and habits? What was the role of social media platforms in performing this kind of resistance? Was this a temporary phenomenon in response to the trauma of war or will it have lasting impact?