Of pedagogy and cultural production: Armenian-language instruction in the diaspora

by Talar Chahinian

Published: Wednesday February 04, 2009 in Critics' Forum

Every fall, the Board of Regents of Prelacy Armenian Schools organizes a professional-development day for teachers working in California's private Armenian schools, including those not affiliated with the Prelacy. This year, I had the opportunity to participate in this one-day seminar, leading one of the workshops designed to address questions of methodology and curriculum for the schools' departments of Armenian language and literature.

Although I was working particularly with middle-school teachers, later conversation with other workshop leaders revealed that the concerns and strategies that my group discussed were shared by Armenian teachers of all levels, spanning the first through 12th grades. What seemed to resonate throughout the workshops was an urgent need to fundamentally change the way Armenian language is currently taught in Armenian schools; specifically, to teach it as a second language rather than as the students' first language or "mother tongue."

The teaching of the Armenian language in diaspora communities of Western countries has always been challenging and difficult. The establishment of Armenian schools in the greater Los Angeles area immediately following the initial flow of migration of Armenians from the Middle East in the 1960s launched a brief period of revival and promise for the future of the Armenian language in the West. What has seemed to follow, in the last couple of decades, is a gradual decline that is both silently acknowledged by the entire community yet neglected as a high priority concern when it comes to measurable action.

This may be an appropriate moment to raise the question about the value of Armenian language in relation to other markers of identity for Armenians living outside of Armenia. What is the significance of ensuring the preservation and cultivation of the Armenian language in the diaspora? My humble answer is as follows: Everything. If we are to regard language as a system of signs by which we construct meaning and come to understand and express our sense of self, then the Armenian language is both a tool for forging a collective group identity, a psychology, and a way of life; and their representation in, and as, culture. Language is at the core of cultural production in diaspora communities.

When we conceive of the peril of extinction gnawing at the Armenian language in diaspora communities, we don't have to go far to seek its cause: the great dispersion of Armenians following the 1915 Genocide has forced the Armenian language into exile and possible extinction, and the language at stake is the Western Armenian linguistic form, for the Eastern form has a territorial home in the Armenian republic.

But the concern over the modern Armenian language's longevity and the debate around its development predate the 1915 Catastrophe. In 1911, the prominent poet and intellectual Taniel Varuzan published an article titled, "The Question of the Armenian Language," in the Constantinople weekly Azadamard. Written in response to questions raised by the newspaper and its readers, the article outlines the development of the Armenian language's Western and Eastern forms during the period of modernization, addresses concerns about the infiltration of the French in Western Armenian and Russian in Eastern Armenian, criticizes the detachment of Western Armenian (then termed "Turkish Armenian") from the stylistic and dialectical essence of provincial Armenian, and celebrates each linguistic form's diversity. The article is an exposition against calls for assimilating the two forms for the sake of a unified standard Armenian.

In making his case against the forced fusion of Western and Eastern Armenian, Varujan writes, "Let us for a moment disregard the three main obstacles to such an assimilation, i.e., the people, the literary past, and the deep differences that exist between the two languages, and let us throw the Eastern and Western forms into one melting pot. What is to come forth? An amorphous conglomerate, a linguistic medley, an alchemical compound, from which we are sure not to receive gold."

The "amorphous conglomerate" that Varujan imagines resulting from the fusion of the Western and Eastern forms is precisely what haunts many of the Armenian-language classrooms, according to the teachers present at the workshop. As an Armenian community composed of "second diasporas," the greater Los Angeles area has hosted immigrants from "first diasporas" like Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, as well as immigrants from what is now the Republic of Armenia. As a result, Los Angeles has become an experimental space for the intermingling of both Western and Eastern forms of the language, further complicated by the dialectical variants of each form.

Due to such exposure, the younger generation ends up producing an unprecedented hybrid form of the language, one that defies any sense of pattern, order, or recognition of existing standards. Consequently, it becomes difficult for teachers to introduce and demand the practice of one form over the other. Since the majority of Armenian schools in California teach only Western Armenian, the need to expand their curriculums to include instruction in Eastern Armenian seems of utmost importance.