Author: USC Institute of Armenian Studies

What happens when the language you inherit is not the language of the place you have come to think of as home? And what does it mean to be told—implicitly or explicitly—that the Armenian you speak is somehow the wrong one? Dr. K sits down with poet and creative producer Nyree Abrahamian to trace a linguistic life that moves from Western Armenian in Toronto to Eastern Armenian in Yerevan, with English, French, dialect, and plenty of mixing along the way. Their conversation explores what happens when heritage language meets homeland, why categories like “native speaker,” “diasporan,” and even “repatriate” can…

Why do Armenians write the same language differently? Why do debates over spelling evoke such strong emotions? And what can linguistic scholarship reveal about one of Armenian’s most enduring controversies? In this episode, Dr. K continues her conversation with historical and comparative linguist Dr. Hrach Martirosyan, one of the world’s leading specialists on the history of Armenian, to explore the evolution of Armenian orthography—the shared conventions that govern how a language is written. Drawing on historical linguistics and comparative examples from languages around the world, they examine why writing systems evolve, how orthographic reforms unfold, and where the Armenian experience…

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