Forcibly displaced from Artsakh work to preserve dialect despite discrimination
As Azerbaijan’s troops approached the edge of Artsakh’s (Nagorno-Karabakh) capital Stepanakert on September 25, 2023, Lusine Gharakhanyan was standing in front of her bookshelf, perplexed.
Five days before, Artsakh soldiers had started laying down their arms as dictated by a Russia-brokered surrender. Unprotected locals, including Gharakhanyan and her family, had to uproot their lives and leave. She quickly got some clothes and shoes together, but having to pack up what she calls her “self” – her language and culture – was puzzling.
“I looked at my library with such regret,” she recalls. “But, having to choose, I picked four books. Among them was a phraseological dictionary of the Karabakh [Artsakh] dialect and a book about Artsakh folklore.”
A psychologist who previously served as education minister in the Artsakh Republic, Gharakhanyan, 45, knew that preserving Artsakh’s distinctive dialect of Armenian would be essential to the well-being of a people displaced from their homeland.
“A person lives on the basis of two specific psychological factors: personal identity and national identity. Both are deeply rooted in dialect,” Gharakhanyan explains. “Our thinking, our behavior, our morality, and our beliefs are all in our dialect. Our dialect is our being.”
Digitizing the language to share and remember
Following Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, fear of losing the Artsakh dialect has become increasingly prevalent among exiled community members.
Some Artsakh Armenians have turned to creating initiatives in an effort to preserve the language. In December 2023, Lika Zakaryan, 30, started a CivilNet podcast called “Muklimandil,” a word that means “spider web” in the Artsakh dialect — a title she chose because of the tangled personal stories at the heart of the crisis in Artsakh.
“I got this idea that we should collect human stories and we should do it in Artsakh dialect – to preserve the dialect, to have content in the dialect,” Zakaryan says. “I feel that if the language disappears, it’s one more step toward us disappearing.”
Tatevik Khachatrian, 30, who co-founded another audio show called “PodQat,” says digital archiving is essential in keeping the dialect alive. Her podcast, like “Muklimandil,” is conducted solely in the Artsakh dialect.
“If people do not live in the same place, dialects – even languages – cannot live long, so we thought we needed to save the language in a digital format,” Khachatrian tells CivilNet. “The only way to convey and preserve it is through the real sound.”
For both Zakaryan and Khachatrian, creating the podcasts and continuing to speak the Artsakh dialect is vital to their well-being. With their physical homes now under Azerbaijani control and many cultural heritage sites intentionally destroyed or under threat, the Artsakh dialect is one of the only aspects of their culture that they have been able to keep.
“For me, preserving the dialect is a way of preserving myself — my identity,” Zakaryan says.
For Khachatrian, the dialect’s presence and visibility are mostly about being understood.
“When you are walking in the streets and hear your native dialect, you become happier because you realize that these people have gone through the same thing and that they definitely understand you,” Khachatrian says. “Being around people who understand you is always more pleasant than being with people who cannot fully grasp what has happened to you, who think you’ve been depressed for ‘too long’ because ‘it’s been almost a year’ [since the ethnic cleansing].”
“With people who share your problems and your past, you feel more normal,” she adds.
Discrimination: another hurdle to language preservation
According to the podcasters, occasional discrimination against Artsakh Armenians in society makes their already difficult task — preserving a unique culture and dialect — even harder.
In one episode of “PodQat” discussing intolerance in Armenia toward Artsakh Armenians, Khachatrian’s co-host Mariam Sargsyan, 30, recalls being belittled for using the Artsakh dialect with her child.
“The other day we were invited somewhere as a whole family, and…when I started talking with my child in the [Artsakh] dialect, one of the men who had already drunk a bit decided to scold me,” Sargsyan said. “He told me, ‘Why don’t you speak normal Armenian with that child?’”
Such discrimination stems, in part, from the difficulty some speakers of the “normal Armenian” – that is, the Eastern Armenian Standard – have understanding the Artsakh Armenian dialect. Hrach Martirosyan, a prominent linguist, says the Artsakh dialect differs from what is generally spoken in Yerevan in terms of vocabulary and sound.
“When it comes to pronunciation, in Yerevan the accent is mostly on the last syllable, but those from Lori or Artsakh put the accent on the second to last syllable,” Martirosyan tells Civilnet.
Speakers of the Artsakh dialect also tend to use different loanwords than other dialect speakers, adding a dimension of difficulty. For many, the Artsakh dialect can be, to some degree, unintelligible.
“In terms of vocabulary, there are Turkish and Persian loanwords in many Armenian dialects, and vice versa,” Martirosyan says. “There are Azerbaijani loanwords in the Artsakh dialect that are not as common [in other dialects],” he adds, noting that “there is some give-and-take between Eastern Armenian dialects and Azerbaijani,” with loan words going both ways.
Among those Eastern Armenian Standard dialects is the Araratian, specific to Yerevan, and the Araratian dialect and the Artsakh dialects are not too far from each other linguistically, according to Martirosyan. “Yerevan and Artsakh are quite close – not as close as Syunik and Artsakh, but close nevertheless,” he says.
The fact that there is bias against Artsakh Armenian even though the country has such a wide variety of dialects – with some differing from the Yerevan dialect more than the Artsakh one – makes the language-driven discrimination particularly frustrating. It showcases the unwillingness of some Yerevan Armenians to make an effort in learning and understanding, according to Azat Adamyan, 34, the owner of “Bardak,” a now Yerevan-based bar that previously served as the only pub and one of a few community gathering spaces in Stepanakert.
“It’s just that we have a different dialect. Yerevan has its own jargon which I do not use, because I like literary Armenian,” Adamyan says. “Look around Armenia, please. We all have dialects, we can understand each other freely. It’s your problem that you do not understand us.”
To that point, Martirosyan points out that many Armenian dialects are similar to the Artsakh dialect.
“In terms of sound, the Artsakh dialect is similar to all of these other dialects — Vayots Dzor, Goris, Syunik, Tavush,” Martirosyan says, adding that linguists often group them together based on their phonetic similarities.
Path forward
Despite incidents of discrimination, many Armenians approach Artsakh Armenians with a positive outlook.
“The first day after I came to Yerevan, I was walking, and people were coming up to me and supporting me, offering help after they heard I spoke in Artsakh dialect,” Adamyan recalls.
But in his opinion, the only path forward is to get rid of any discrimination, positive or negative.
“I don’t want to divide people. I opened this bar, but I never advertised it as the territory of Artsakh Armenians,’ Adamyan explains. “That’s why I don’t even put the [Artsakh] flag here – I had it up, but took it down. I do not want them to pity us. I do not want to stand out simply because I am from Artsakh.”
Adamyan says there should be a better integration system for Artsakh Armenians in Armenia.
“Every day I feel like things are set up in a way so that Artsakh Armenians leave everything and return to Artsakh [while still under Azerbaijan’s control] in a few months,” he says, referring to the lack of government-sponsored programs that would assist forcefully displaced people in permanently settling and integrating in Armenia.
Zakaryan agrees with him that the government needs to do more. According to her, many cultural groups that the government of Artsakh once funded are now struggling to support themselves.
“Every cultural group that I know has no funding. In general, all cultural fields of Artsakh are very much at risk of disappearing, and the dialect is one part of it,” Zakaryan said. “How can they keep [going], if they have no funding?”
But despite the difficulties, Adamyan says he remains optimistic.
“The dialect will surely endure because we communicate in it, we talk to each other,” he insists.
And Zakaryan wants to make sure that happens, hopeful she will be able to play a role in the dialect’s preservation.
“I want to translate some animation movies [into] the Artsakh dialect so that children can watch their favorite things in the Artsakh dialect, and it could be in their minds,” she says. “Because if the younger generation isn’t going to learn it, then it’s lost forever. And no one is going to bring it back.”
