Raising Social Awareness: Preserving the Armenian Language in the Age of Multilingualism.

Introduction

Language is a fundamental pillar when it comes to cultural knowledge transmission, communication, cultural identity and innovation. It is what separates humanity from animals. The languages that are going extinct are crucial parts of their communities’ identities, which enrich our world’s diverse community.

The preservation of world language is essential to preserving global culture, as it is a fundamental building block when it comes to passing down cultural knowledge and history. Language is how myths, stories, history and traditions are passed down through generations and exchanges. Hence, it reinforces cultural identity and provides a sense of belonging and continuity. Global culture and how it is spread rely heavily on language. And how language has evolved, innovated and adapted reflects humanity’s cultural development. Language should be preserved.

Video gif. An upset Donald Trump holds up a finger at the audience as he speaks into a microphone. Text, "This is not going to end well."

However, it is also well-established that knowledge of a second language impacts the ability to manage information in the native language, and current cognitive and psycholinguistic models of bilingualism explicitly posit that the two languages interact, even during language-specific processing. Language transfer may occur in both directions: either from the first language to the second or from the second to the first. The study of language transfer is incomplete if either direction is ignored. Extensive and all-encompassing studies have been witnessed on the study of the effect of the first language on the second while it leaves us much room of investigation related to the study of the effect of the second language on the first.

Language transfer plays an indispensable part in the study of second language acquisition. The transfer is
bidirectional: the first language can have effect on the second language and the second language can also exert influence on the first language. The former is called forward transfer and the latter backward transfer.

Different nations have their own specific thinking pattern due to the differences from the perspective of history, geography, religion, customs and cultural background. Language reflects mind. As far as English and Chinese are concerned, English lays stress on hypotaxis－the use of cohesive devices whereas Chinese on parataxis－the logical relations among the parts. For example, English and Chinese display discrepancies in expressing causal relations. Causal relations play an important role in knowing and understand relations among things. English causal clause and Chinese causal clause are basic ways to show this relation. English and Chinese exhibit some differences as regards the distribution of main and adverbial clauses and whether the connectives can be used together or not.

The forms of Armenian language and its challenges

A critical challenge in preserving Armenian today is its status as a pluricentric language, fundamentally split into two standardized forms: Eastern Armenian (EA) and Western Armenian (WA). While mutually intelligible to varying degrees, these two standards are linguistically and sociologically distinct, carrying different histories and emotional associations. Eastern Armenian functions as the official state language of the Republic of Armenia (RA) and is primarily spoken in the homeland, Iran, and the post-Soviet Diaspora (notably Russia, which has 510,000 speakers of the Eastern variety). EA is the institutionally stable variant, boasting an estimated 3.8 million speakers as of 2013. Conversely, Western Armenian is the main language of the traditional Armenian diaspora, used in communities across the Middle East, North America, and South America (e.g., Lebanon, United States, Argentina). WA has an estimated 1.58 million native speakers worldwide.

This linguistic divergence is not purely lexical; it is structural. The most significant differences occur at the phonetic-phonological level, particularly within the plosive and affricate series. Standard Eastern Armenian employs a three-way voicing distinction (voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated), a feature largely absent in Standard Western Armenian. This divergence creates substantial obstacles for unified resource development, especially concerning technology and pedagogy. Furthermore, this structural division is amplified by a striking demographic imbalance: the Armenian Diaspora, which predominantly speaks WA, is estimated to contain more than 10 million individuals, far exceeding the approximately 3 million Armenians living in the Republic of Armenia.

The threat to Armenian linguistic continuity is fundamentally driven by the pressures of multilingualism, which manifests differently in the politically sovereign homeland versus the dispersed diaspora communities. These exogenous pressures accelerate language loss by shifting competence away from the ancestral language toward dominant regional or global tongues.

Global Forces: Globalization and English Linguistic Imperialism

The overarching threat to many endangered languages, including Armenian, is the acceleration of language death caused by globalization and cultural replacement. Younger generations increasingly prioritize global languages, predominantly English, over their ancestral languages due to perceived socio-economic benefits. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, English rapidly replaced Russian in many high-status domains within the independent Republic of Armenia, including business, diplomacy, science, and computing.

This phenomenon, often categorized as linguistic imperialism, extends into the digital sphere. While social media offers potential spaces for community language practice, it frequently reinforces English as the default modality of communication. This structural bias requires young Armenians to engage in a continuous confrontation between their native tongue and English, which is widely viewed as the essential language for achieving “opportunities and modernity”. This societal perception creates a strong external pull that can weaken intergenerational language transmission, even in institutionalized settings.

While English represents the new economic and globalizing pressure, Russian maintains a tenacious influence over Eastern Armenian, reflective of the language’s historical context. Russian remains the first foreign language taught in Armenia and is known by the majority of the population. Historically, during the Soviet era, Eastern Armenian was subjected to heavy pressure from Russian, resulting in a core structure rooted in Classical Armenian (Grabar) but significantly influenced by Russian language and lexicon.

The contemporary geopolitical influence of Russia further exacerbates this linguistic pressure. The widespread knowledge of Russian in Armenia serves as the primary “transmitter” of Russian media influence, which often reproduces authoritarian values that can hinder the diversity of opinion within the local information landscape. Furthermore, Russian acts as an intermediary language in educational settings, particularly when teaching English, thereby embedding Russian mediation into the acquisition of new, high-status languages.

The threat structure for Eastern Armenian is therefore bidirectional: it faces enduring vertical, post-colonial influence from Russian simultaneously overlaid by new horizontal, globalizing pressure from English. This complex, layered threat makes policy formulation exceptionally difficult for the Republic of Armenia, as efforts to promote Armenian media might compete with the necessity of adopting English terminology for technological advancement, potentially destabilizing EA’s institutional status.

A significant ideological counter-force to assimilation and shift is the concept of linguistic purity. In diaspora literature, there is a recurring theme that preserving the Armenian language requires keeping it “pure,” actively purging it of “foreign words and the unfamiliar ones,” as a means of resisting cultural erosion. The language is praised as a “God-given” “mother tongue and the jewel,” emphasizing the cultural imperative to maintain its pristine form.

Armenia’s Law on Language includes provisions that obligate officials and citizens in official conversation to ensure the “purity of the language”. While intended to protect the language’s integrity against excessive foreign influence, this ideological commitment creates a significant tension with the functional needs of modernization. If the language’s lexicon is rigidly policed for purity, it will struggle to develop the necessary technical terminology required for modern domains such as STEM, IT, and global commerce. This inflexibility inadvertently forces young, career-focused speakers to rely on English or Russian for technical communication, leading to domain loss and ultimately accelerating language shift in high-status economic and academic spheres. Therefore, the legislative emphasis on purity risks setting an unrealistically high standard that may prove detrimental to the language’s pragmatic viability in a modernizing society.

Conclusion

The preservation of the Armenian language in the age of global multilingualism is a highly complex, multi-faceted challenge defined by the pluricentric division and the historical context of displacement. The effort is characterized by a two-front battle: Western Armenian is primarily threatened by immediate intergenerational shift and assimilation, posing a clear survival threat ; Eastern Armenian, though institutionally stable, faces a persistent threat to its lexical integrity and modernization due to continuous post-colonial influence (Russian) and global economic pressure (English).

The long-term health of the language depends on the success of transnational efforts to bridge the linguistic gap between EA and WA, transforming the dual standards from a liability into a source of national linguistic richness.

The preservation of the Armenian language is a unique test of transnational identity maintenance. Its future viability in the multilingual age hinges entirely on the capacity of the Homeland and the Diaspora to transcend the political and structural fragmentation of its two standard variants. By embracing a strategy of distributed linguistic responsibility, prioritizing pragmatic technological integration, and fostering bilingual competence, the Armenian nation can solidify a shared, modern, and resilient linguistic identity that reinforces the extraordinary historical survival of this unique Indo-European branch. The lessons derived from this case study—particularly the institutionalization of endangered diaspora languages via non-state mechanisms—offer critical models for other historically dispersed nations battling the accelerated linguistic shifts driven by globalization.

The work was carried out within the framework of the English course “Raising Social Awareness” project.
The research was conducted by Lily Giragosian and David Muradyan.

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