By Ella Chakarian
Special to the Mirror-Spectator
Anelga Hajjar started posting videos on TikTok feeling the way most people do — like she was just talking into the void. In Chicago, where she works as an actor and writer, Hajjar, 23, said the majority of Armenians around her speak Eastern Armenian. She said she struggles to find other Western Armenian speakers herself. So, she turned to social media.
“I just wanted to have a space where I myself could speak Armenian, because there’s no one here I can speak Armenian [with],” said Hajjar.
Hajjar is part of what seems to be a growing movement on social media, one where young Armenians in the diaspora are bringing Western Armenian to the digital sphere. It’s an effort to conserve the dialect, which UNESCO has classified as “vulnerable“ in its World Atlas of Languages. U.S. Census data from 2023 says that there are 244,896 Armenian speakers in the United States, but doesn’t make a dialectical distinction between Eastern or Western Armenian. A reliable number of remaining Western Armenian speakers in the U.S. is unclear.
“My intention was to create a tool of preservation and improve my own Armenian,” said Hajjar, whose TikTok account has more than 2,500 followers. “Not only is the language endangered, but the places where it’s being spoken have such existential threats posed on them constantly, like in Lebanon and Syria.”
While Eastern Armenian is the standardized language in Armenia and Iran, Western Armenian only has a home in nooks of the Armenian diaspora, in remaining households where the language has been passed down from the days of the Ottoman Empire. And it struggles to survive in its displacement. Now, the endurance of the dialect depends on the stretched Western Armenian-speaking communities across the world, from Beirut to Los Angeles.
Not only does this social media effort intend to safeguard a language imbued in collective grief, but it’s an attempt at making Western Armenian interactive, accessible and joyful. Since starting her account, Hajjar said she feels more connected to the language, finding herself thinking and reacting in Armenian. The response online has been overwhelming. “Just off the bat, there were many thousands of views on my first few videos,” she said.
Hajjar tends to post content about her life, and nothing seems off the table. She makes videos getting ready to go out to friends’ birthday parties and speaks candidly about her dating life. Watching her videos feels like scrolling through a digital diary. While the response has been strikingly encouraging, Hajjar said she receives a fair share of negative comments, too.
“Sometimes the hate is genuinely poetic,” laughed Hajjar. “If my content is inspiring you to write hate in Armenian, at least it’s in Armenian. At least you’re using our mother tongue.”
Twin sisters Jenny and Isabelle Kouyoumdjian, 22, are also familiar with the feeling of having strangers from around the world peek into their daily lives, which they document on Instagram and TikTok. The pair started posting videos of themselves speaking Western Armenian as a class project last January. Since then, their accounts have collectively garnered over 4,500 followers and thousands more views and likes.
It started with a simple video of the pair talking to a camera in the botanical gardens at their university in Los Angeles. “Creating a TikTok page was an idea to bring our daily life to all of you while only speaking in Armenian, especially since we feel that there aren’t many videos on TikTok in the Armenian language,” they explain in the recording. Since then, they’ve posted videos explaining complex science terms, sharing information about the devastating California wildfires and documenting the U.S. voting process— all in Western Armenian.
“I’ve heard Western Armenian is a dying language,” said Isabelle. “It’s not as common to hear, see and be exposed to Western Armenian. When we started our TikTok page, it was like, ‘let’s boost the Armenian language on social media.’”
For many Armenians in the diaspora, Western Armenian flutters around in daily life, in conversations with their grandparents, at family gatherings, murmurs at Sunday church services and exchanges with community elders. Even in Armenian day schools in the United States, the students tend to switch to English outside of classroom walls. Finding a Western Armenian speaker in an unfamiliar place always feels like a pleasant surprise. The Kouyoumdjians wanted to bring that sense of unexpected camaraderie to the digital sphere.
“Our objective is that you’re learning new words from Armenian in a conversational way,” said Isabelle, noting that they had never come across content similar to theirs.
Community organizations have taken initiatives to preserve Western Armenian. Online platforms, summer camps and educational programs across the diaspora are key to conserving the unique dialect. While the weight to preserve Western Armenian has historically fallen on institutions, individual efforts like these social media pages are “critical,” according to Khatchig Mouradian, a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University.
Mouradian believes that the recent uptick in social media posts in Armenian could be catalyzed by the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. “I think the last few years have become a huge wake up call to many Armenians who took their identity for granted or didn’t really think much about [their] culture,” he concluded.
For historian and translator Vartan Matiossian, the future of Western Armenian has been a cause for concern since UNESCO first attributed the dialect “endangered” over a decade ago. For the “stateless language” to exist, Matiossian is adamant that it has to be part of daily life, used as a “tool for full expression.” He equates the loss of the dialect to the loss of a distinctive understanding of the world.
Whether the dialect will endure or become relegated to an academic study is up to those who make an active effort to weave it into their daily lives. For Western Armenian to survive as something beyond an archival curiosity, it has to be woven into everyday reality, including the digital sphere. The future of the language in part is tied to its ability to survive the digital world, and the emergence of social media pages like Hajjar’s and Kouyoumdjians’ makes that possible.
In an increasingly digitized world, Matiossian believes that these videos are a “useful” way to become acquainted with the language, but more work will have to go into the multigenerational preservation of the language. “At a certain point, they need to be complemented by the printed letter as a way to enlarge the language field and the understanding of the culture that lies behind it,” he said.
For these creators, speaking the language is not just a tool for preservation, but an act of cultivating a sense of belonging. Hajjar said she will continue to post videos to her page, hoping to one day host events with other Western Armenian speakers in her community.
“No language is saved because it’s a great language,” said Mouradian. “Languages are saved because those who speak them find creative ways of making them current in any particular reality — and social media posts are an important part of our reality today.”
(Ella Chakarian is a journalist who has covered culture, geopolitics, conflict and human rights issues. She was formerly a reporting fellow with the Pulitzer Center, and her work has appeared in Bellingcat, Eurasianet, The Progressive and more. She holds an M.S. from Columbia Journalism School and a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley.)
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