The International Panorama of the Armenian Language. language policy and education"

On September 27, 2024, within the framework of the international conference "Issues of Armenian Studies and Linguistics", Gayane Hovhannisyan, head of the Department of English Translation, Brusov State University, gave a speech on "The International Panorama of the Armenian Language. language policy and education".

Describing the demographic picture of the Armenian language in Armenia and the Diaspora, she made an important observation about the perspectives of the Armenian language development. In particular, she mentioned that " Armenian is one of the low-resource languages ​​of the modern world with its endangered Western branch. Rethinking and reconceptualizing the real picture of our language is necessary to ensure its viability in the new digital environment. The fact is that due to the massive immigration and emigration of recent years, in both Armenia and the Diaspora the cases of merging Eastern and Western dialects have increased in the spoken Armenian. In particular, for low-resource and minority languages, merging speech variants is one way of preserving, revitalizing and developing a language. Notably, today's trend of unification of spoken Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian was preceded by the assimilation of various lexical and grammatical units from English, Arabic, Russian, French and other languages. Therefore, by the self-generated unification of its branches, the Armenian language is nurtured directly by its internal resources and indirectly through the acquired and appropriated external sources. In her speech, Professor Hovhannisyan proposed to consistently implement the following steps of language policy.

  • To develop translation technologies and increase the level of translation literacy in the professional and wider circles of society.
  • Implementation of a policy of manageable multilingualism.
  • Non-avoidance and acceptance of the free use of both versions of Armenian and the fusion of their localized dialects.
  • Collecting robust data on absolutely all forms of Armenian by means of corpus research in order to develop a new, unified and enriched language standard.
The International Panorama of the Armenian Language. language policy and education"