The grief of not having the right words: Is Western Armenian fading?
I only recently learned that Western Armenian is officially classified as an endangered language. According to UNESCO‘s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, Western Armenian is classified as a “definitely endangered” language. This assessment is based not simply on the total number of people who speak Western Armenian, but on whether the language is being passed naturally from one generation to the next and used fluently in everyday life.
While an estimated 1.6 million Armenians worldwide speak Western Armenian, the number of active, fluent speakers is believed to be significantly lower — approximately 200,000, according to some estimates — which raises concerns about the language’s long-term vitality.
Scholars and organizations, such as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Western Armenian Programme, have repeatedly warned that intergenerational transmission is weakening across many diaspora communities.
My immediate reaction is disbelief: How can a language spoken in Armenian homes, schools, churches and community centers across the world be endangered?
As someone who grew up in the Armenian diaspora in Cyprus, Western Armenian seemed to be everywhere. It was the language of grandparents, community events, church gatherings and childhood classrooms. Its presence felt so natural that I rarely questioned its future.
However, there is a fact that many Western Armenian speakers, including me, can easily forget: Western Armenian is not the official language of any state.
Eastern Armenian is the official language of the Republic of Armenia, where it enjoys the support of state institutions, public education, government administration and national media.
Western Armenian, by contrast, exists almost entirely in diaspora communities. Today, it is surviving through families, schools, churches, cultural organizations and the dedication of speakers themselves.
While many diaspora Armenians are fluent in Western Armenian, the question is whether we continue to live in it. A language does not disappear overnight; it fades when it becomes a place we occasionally visit rather than a home we inhabit.
The Armenian school paradox
For many diaspora Armenians, Western Armenian exists within carefully defined spaces. We learn it confidently in Armenian schools, hear it in church, speak it with grandparents and perhaps use it at community gatherings.
These institutions have done remarkable work preserving our language through generations of displacement and assimilation.
Yet outside those spaces, life often unfolds in English, French, Arabic, Spanish or another dominant language. We leave Armenian school and return to a world where Armenian is rarely necessary.
This creates what I think of as the “Armenian school paradox.”
Thousands of students spend years studying Western Armenian, but many find their fluency weakening as adults. I think the issue is not a lack of education, but a lack of opportunity.
After graduation, where do we use the language? With whom do we speak it regularly? What spaces exist for us to continue developing our vocabulary, discussing contemporary issues or expressing ourselves creatively?
A language can be taught, but it also needs a life beyond the classroom.
A language without a stage
Part of the challenge Western Armenian speakers face is that the language often lacks a stage on which to perform. Languages thrive when they are used to create, entertain and connect. Yet much of the media consumed by younger diaspora Armenians exists in dominant languages.
We watch films, listen to podcasts and spend hours on social media in those languages. Contemporary Western Armenian content, by contrast, remains limited and often difficult to find.
As an author, I also see this imbalance in publishing. While precise figures vary, most Armenian-language books published today are in Eastern Armenian.
The publishing center is the Republic of Armenia, where Eastern Armenian is the language of education, government, media and publishing.
Western Armenian publishing is spread across diaspora communities, producing far fewer contemporary works and fewer opportunities to encounter the language in fiction, journalism, criticism, children’s literature and digital media.
As a result, Western Armenian is often linked to textbooks, history lessons and commemorative events rather than everyday expression. It becomes a language of preservation rather than participation.
People do not sustain languages through obligation alone. They sustain them because those languages are used to live daily life — to joke, to fall in love, to argue, to dream and to create. When a language is absent from those spaces, it becomes harder to keep it alive.
It goes without saying that Western Armenian has a rich literary tradition, from Hagop Oshagan and Zabel Yesayan to Shahan Shahnour and Daniel Varoujan. The challenge is that contemporary production does not yet match the scale or visibility of Eastern Armenian cultural output.
Grieving a language before it is gone
What makes this issue particularly painful is that language loss is deeply personal. Many diaspora Armenians understand more Western Armenian than they can comfortably speak.
We recognize the words but sometimes struggle to find them ourselves. We understand our grandparents’ stories, yet cannot always respond with the same fluency.
This feeling takes me back to a poem I studied years ago in an English literature class: Sujata Bhatt’s “Search for My Tongue.” In it, Bhatt reflects on the fear of losing her mother tongue, Gujarati, as another language begins to take its place.
She describes how it can feel as though her “first tongue” is fading before returning again in dreams, alive and deeply rooted. One passage has stayed with me ever since:
“Every time I think I’ve forgotten
I think I’ve lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.”
There are moments when I feel distant from Western Armenian, only for a phrase, an idiom or a childhood memory to suddenly return and remind me that it is still there.
Alongside that frustration often comes guilt. Western Armenian survived genocide, displacement and exile, and many of us feel a responsibility to carry it forward.
When fluency fades, we risk losing a direct connection to the language and to the generations who passed it down to us.
Western Armenian survived genocide. Can it survive the diaspora?
Before the genocide, Western Armenian was spoken widely across historical Western Armenia within the Ottoman Empire, in cities and regions such as Van, Erzurum, Bitlis, Harput (Kharpert), Sivas and throughout Cilicia, as well as in Istanbul, a major center of Armenian intellectual, literary and cultural life.
Soon after, Western Armenian survived one of the greatest attempts at cultural destruction in modern history. It endured because communities fought to preserve it under unimaginably difficult circumstances.
Our ancestors rebuilt schools, churches and cultural institutions wherever they settled, understanding that preserving the language was essential to preserving Armenian identity itself.
Today, the threat is different. No one is forbidding us from speaking Western Armenian, per se. Instead, the danger comes from disuse. Modern life in host countries leaves little room for Western Armenian to be used regularly. Assimilation is far quieter than persecution, but its effects can be just as lasting.
What would it mean for Western Armenian to thrive?
The statistics about Western Armenian are alarming, but they also make me reflect on my own relationship with the language.
Part of me knows it isn’t going anywhere, that it will continue to live through the people who speak, teach and pass it on. But another part of me is scared by how fragile it can feel when you look at the numbers and the gradual loss of everyday use.
I, along with many diaspora Armenians, speak it whenever I can with family, friends and other Armenians. I am also grateful that I had the opportunity to attend an Armenian school and learn it from an early age, as I know many diaspora Armenians never had that privilege.
There is still hope for Western Armenian to survive, but that will depend on us. We need to use it, create in it and pass it on.
For many of us, it carries family stories, humor, memories and a sense of belonging that cannot be fully translated. If it is to survive the diaspora, it must remain more than a language we learn. It must remain a language we live in.
Western Armenian is under serious threat of extinction in the entire Armenian Diaspora, with the possible exception of Lebanon, because like every diaspora around the world, most of the Armenian Diaspora have been assimilated in the host countries over the many decades and the majority don’t speak or understand it.
The loss of Western Armenian through assimilation, is the bloodless continuance of the Armenian Genocide.
The problem is not only living in a foreign country, where assimiliation is inevitable, the problem is also the lack of or the very few number of Armenian schools and kindergardens, the dispersal of Armenians, but even more so that fewer parents pass on Western Armenian to their children. Intermarriages with non-Armenians are also a reason for this decline, as the language is also much less likely to be passed on to the children (one can hardly forbid people intermarrying for love).
The buck ultimately stops with the parents and families who should teach and pass on Western Armenian to the children.
The advent of the Internet can partially remedy this decline with online Western Armenian courses, if Armenian schools and kindergardens are unavailable, but especially if parents teach and pass on Western Armenian to their children. I hope that the Armenian Diaspora doesn’t become like the huge and totally assimilated Italian Diaspora around the world, where the only heritage remaining, is the surname.
There may also be a prosaic reason, western Armenian under Turkish rule was considered a more demotic language than eastern Armenian under Persian rule. Also as Persian is an Indo European language like Armenian it would have had a less adverse influence upon the language. Perhaps akin to the divergence of Korean nowadays from outside imposed division and influences . Similar to the difference between Serbian and Croatian Czech and Slovak where an originally closer speech became more divergent. Eastern Armenian being understood to be more original and surviving in the truncated homeland, whereas Western Armenian was eviscerated by the murder and banishment of the majority of the speakers and the subsequent speak Turkish policy of the new republic of Turkey aimed at establishing a national identity around a single language and the use of the Roman alphabet. Hence in todays Armenia the western form would be seen as an inferior and alien iteration. Thus in the diaspora in Lebanese, France and USA it would been more popular being ancestral and in Armenia would have been seen as a needless division of the people thus not encouraged.
American Armenians need to embrace AI and develop tools that would make learning Western Armenian fun and easy for children to learn.
The standard of education in American Armenian schools needs to be raised.
I have never met any American Armenians who can speak fluently.
Their American accents are very noticeable.
Certainly, Armenians, who speak Eastern Armenian, can tell very quickly that they are foreigners.
First of all, I think both the Western and the Eastern Armenian dialects are our wealth and assets and they need to be treasured, preserved and protected. I speak, read and write Eastern Armenian fluently but I am also very familiar with the Western Armenian dialect. I can read and even speak it with very little effort, and would definitely hate to see it gone. If you pay close attention to the lyrics, the words sung, in many Armenian folk songs, you will realize that they are mostly in Western Armenian dialect. I think if you know one dialect fluently, you can easily learn the other. The main differences I find between the two are in the grammar, the way sentences are formed, the way certain words are ended, and most importantly the way words are pronounced.
I’m no language expert by any means but, for example, to say “I’m from the United States. I live and work here.” in Western Armenian, you would say “Miatsyal Nahangneren em. Hos gabrim, hos al gashkhadim. Միացյալ Նահանգներեն եմ. Հոս կապրիմ, հոս ալ կաշխատիմ.” To say the same thing in Eastern Armenian, you would say “Miatsyal Nahangnerits em. Ays tegh kaprem, ays tegh el kashkhatem. Միացյալ Նահանգներից եմ. Այս տեղ կապրեմ, այս տեղ էլ կաշխատեմ.” As you can see, with a few exceptions such as “hos” for “ays tegh”, and with very little change and effort you can switch from one dialect to the other. The main differences between the two dialects in this example have to do with how some words are ended. The words “from the United States” in Western Armenian end in “en” as in “Miatsyal Nahangneren” while in Eastern Armenian they end in “its” as in “Miatsyal Nahangnerits”. The words “live“ and “work” end in “im” in Western Armenian as in “gabrim and gashkhadim” while they end in “em” in Eastern Armenian as in “kaprem and kashkhatem”. Also, if you notice, even though the root words of “live and work” in both dialects are written exactly the same in Armenian, they are actually pronounced slightly differently. In Western Armenian, both words are pronounced with the “g” sound while in Eastern Armenian they are pronounced with the “k” sound. That is because the letters in the Armenian alphabet are recited (sounded out) differently. In Western Armenian, they are sounded out as “Ayp”, “Pen”, “Kim”, “Ta” while in Eastern Armenian they are sounded out as “A”, “B”, “G”, “D” exactly as they are written. So, when pronounced or sounded out, the letter “B” in Eastern Armenian becomes a “P” in Western Armenian (Barev vs Parev). Similarly, the letters ”G” and “D” in Eastern Armenian become “K” and “T” in Western Armenian, respectively. As an example, in Eastern Armenian we say “Gevorg” and “Davit” while in Western Armenian we say “Kevork” and “Tavit” for the exact same names!
Furthermore, one thing that I have always noticed in diaspora communities consistently, is the fact that the farther away from the homeland you go the least the language is spoken and practiced. This is our own fault I believe. In diaspora communities in countries in the vicinity of the homeland, such as in countries in the Middle East, you won’t find any Armenian who does not speak the language. These are countries where minorities have limited rights and freedom yet they are the strongest in terms of using and practicing the language, as well as the culture, while in Western countries, the exact opposite is true even though we have the most, even unlimited, rights and freedom to do and live our lives as we see fit. To me, it almost seems like we Armenians thrive under pressure in places with very limited freedom while we fail to use the full freedom granted and afforded to us elsewhere in ways that could make us even stronger than we already are. To pass the language from one generation to another certainly starts at home but unfortunately in many earlier generations the language is no longer spoken even by the parents themselves, let alone to pass it onto their kids. I think without a change in mentality in terms of investing in schools as well as making the learning of the Armenian language more relevant and fun in our daily lives, we ourselves are contributing to the loss of the language in the long run. Unlike many, who falsely would have you believe that language is nothing but just a form and a tool for communication, in reality the language is also the foundation of one’s culture. When you lose the language you also lose your culture!
Again I speak fluent almost accent less Western Armenian . Americans are morons. I can’t speak anything correctly and they have IQ and two digits unless they come from an Asian or middle eastern or European or African family
The other reason apart from the usual assimilation of Western Armenian speakers in the Armenian Diaspora (including in Istanbul), is also due to dialect levelling. That the newer Armenian immigrants in the Armenian Diaspora come from Armenia, the ex-Soviet Republics and from Iran, who speak Eastern Armenian, is another factor why Western Armenian is also squeezed out.
Let’s get Western Armenian in Duolingo!
My grandparents arrived Ellis Island November, 1905 – From Kharpert by way of Brazil – and settled in the San Joaquin Valley.
They spoke what my mother described as Turkish Armenian. My mother never heard of the terms Western or Eastern Armenian. She was
very active at St. James Armenian Church in Los Angeles. When the ‘New Armenians’, as she described them, began attending the church,
and bringing with them their very different Armenian Culture, they ridiculed the language, and the non-aggressive nature of the old timers.
The old timers are pretty much gone now, and with them their food, language, and culture.
I married a young man from India. At the time, my grandfather very suspiciously remarked, “He be Turkey Man”.
There is no blame here, only an anecdotal take.
Peace Out!
Ըսածդ սխալ չի
https://youtu.be/6tksGTuOwlo?si=pENBlaQqIQnGev7N
Արագ Մրցողը կա բայց
https://youtu.be/6tksGTuOwlo?si=pENBlaQqIQnGev7N