Critics’ Forum
Literature
Of Pedagogy and Cultural Production: Armenian Language Instruction
in the Diaspora
By Talar Chahinian
Every fall, the Board of Regents of Prelacy Armenian Schools
organizes a professional development day for teachers working in
California’s private Armenian schools, whether they be affiliated
with the Prelacy or not. This year, I had the opportunity to
participate in this one-day seminar by leading one of the workshops
designed to address questions of methodology and curriculum for the
schools’ Armenian language and literature departments. Although I
was working particularly with middle school teachers, later
conversation with other workshop leaders revealed that the concerns
and strategies that my group discussed were shared by Armenian
teachers of all levels, spanning the first through the twelfth
grades. What seemed to resonate throughout the workshops was an
urgent need to fundamentally change the way Armenian language is
currently taught in Armenian schools – in other words, rather than
teaching it as the students’ first language or "mother tongue,"
teaching it as a second language.
The teaching of the Armenian language in diasporan communities of
Western countries has always embodied notions of challenge and
difficulty. The establishment of Armenian schools in the greater Los
Angeles area immediately following the initial flow of migration of
Armenians from the Middle East in the 1960s launched a brief period
of revival and promise for the future of the Armenian language in the
West. What has seemed to follow in the last couple of decades is a
gradual decline that is both silently acknowledged by the entire
community and yet neglected as a concern of high priority when it
comes to measurable action.
This may be an appropriate moment to raise the question about the
value of Armenian language in relation to other markers of identity
for Armenians living outside of Armenia. What is the significance of
ensuring the preservation and cultivation of the Armenian language in
the diaspora? My humble answer is as follows: Everything. If we
are to regard language as a system of signs by which we construct
meaning and come to understand and express our sense of self, then
the Armenian language is both a tool for forging a collective group
identity, psychology, and way of life and their representation in,
and as, culture. Language is at the core of cultural production in
diasporan communities.
When we conceive of the peril of extinction gnawing at the Armenian
language in diasporan communities, we don’t have to go far to seek
its cause: the great dispersion of Armenians following the 1915
genocide has forced the Armenian language into exile and possible
extinction, and the language at stake is the Western Armenian
linguistic form, for the Eastern form has a territorial home in the
Armenian Republic.
Interestingly, the concern over the modern Armenian language’s
longevity and the debate around its development predates the 1915
Catastrophe. In 1911, the prominent poet and intellectual, Taniel
Varujan, published an article entitled "The Question of Armenian
Language" in the weekly newspaper Azadamard, of Constantinople.
Written in response to questions raised by the newspaper and its
readers, the article outlines the development of Armenian language’s
Western and Eastern forms during the period of modernization,
addresses concerns about the respective infiltration of French and
Russian languages, criticizes Western Armenian’s (then
termed "Turkish Armenian") detachment from the stylistic and
dialectical essence of provincial Armenian, and celebrates each
linguistic form’s diversity in an exposition against the call for
assimilating the two forms for the sake of a unified standard
Armenian.
In making his case against the forced fusion of Western and Eastern
Armenian, Varujan writes, "Let us for a moment disregard the three
main obstacles to such an assimilation, i.e. the people, the literary
past, and the deep differences that exist between the two languages,
and let us throw the Eastern and Western forms into one melting pot.
What is to come forth? An amorphous conglomerate, a linguistic
medley, an alchemical compound, from which we are sure not to receive
gold."
The "amorphous conglomerate" that Varujan imagines resulting from the
fusion of Western and Eastern forms is precisely what haunts many of
the Armenian language classrooms, according to the teachers present
at the workshop. As an Armenian community comprised of "second
diasporas," the greater Los Angeles area has hosted immigrants
from "first diasporas" like Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, as well
as immigrants from the ex-Soviet, now the Republic of, Armenia. As a
result, Los Angeles has become an experimental space for the
intermingling of both Western and Eastern forms of the language,
further complicated by the dialectical variants of each form.
Due to such exposure, the younger generation ends up producing an
unprecedented hybrid form of the language, one that defies any sense
of pattern, order, or recognition of existing standards.
Consequently, it becomes difficult for teachers to introduce and
demand the practice of one form over the other. Since the majority
of Armenian schools in California teach only Western Armenian, the
need to expand their curriculums to include instructions in Eastern
Armenian seems of utmost importance.
Yet allowing students to practice the Armenian language in accordance
with their personal and cultural linguistic background solves only
part of the greater problem. Beyond the difficulties caused by
formal differences, the teachers present at the development workshops
were worried that the Armenian language would lose the battle against
English, and more broadly, the dominance of the monolingual culture
of our environment. The teachers expressed particular concern about
the visible inequality between the Armenian and English curriculums,
commenting on textbooks, resources, as well as student perspectives.
In this regard, they spoke extensively about how the students view
the study of the Armenian language as mandatory and pointless – in
other words, stripped of any utility. In their eyes, the language
not used in play (meaning at recess) is allocated to the classroom,
which renders it archaic, hopelessly detached from everyday usage.
As they maneuver among the digital world of computers, the Internet,
and video games, as they interact with popular representations of
American culture on television, in films, and in music, they perceive
Armenian more and more as sealed in a glass box, stuck somewhere in
the late nineteenth century.
The end result is a perception that the Armenian language – and, by
implication, Armenian culture – lacks dynamism, which although
theoretically false, nonetheless bears considerable truth-value in
their everyday reality. The teachers at the workshop felt almost
unanimously that the only solution to the dilemma of teaching the
Armenian language lies in intervening into this false perception.
Achieving such a change in the perception requires changing in a
fundamental way the approach to Armenian language instruction; it
requires a shift, in other words, from the first-language to the
second-language model. The teachers discussed various short- and
long-term strategies, borrowing from second-language techniques used
by many public institutions. Whereas the short-term suggestions –
focusing primarily on classroom exercises highlighting conversational
language – seemed feasible according to school budget restraints and
the limited time allotted for Armenian language and literature
instruction, the long-term ones – dealing more broadly with
methodology – would require a shift in the community’s priorities.
Along the lines of this second, more long-term strategy, the plan
would have to include the training of new teachers, the retraining of
current ones, the establishment of "language labs" in each school,
and the publication of new textbooks accompanied by digital media.
In making these suggestions, the teachers knew that although all of
these suggestions would be welcomed as innovative ideas by higher
administrative bodies, they would also be met with hesitancy and
eventual neglect due to budgetary concerns.
The entrenchment of the community in its own cultural legacies
presents an ever greater potential obstacle than the retraining of
teachers. Funding for private institutions of education usually
comes from the community – the culture – that supports the
institution’s endeavors. Therefore, shifting the perspective of
students vis-à-vis the Armenian language requires shifting the
perspectives and priorities of the larger community, and culture,
that they inhabit. In a 1996 article entitled "Surreal Armenian:
Language in the Process of Community-Building" published in the
Armenian Studies journal Bazmavep, Ishkhan Jinbashian reviews the
status of the Armenian language in Los Angeles, claiming that "it is
astonishing to find that Armenians, in possession of an immense
cultural treasury, have for decades now, utterly neglected the
Armenian language in the Diaspora, their most salient tool of
expression."
Over a decade later, we are now compelled to express the same
astonishment. In his analysis, Jinbashian attributes the community’s
neglect to the nationalist ideology of what he calls "delayed
paradise," or the notion of an eventual return to Anatolian Armenia,
which has created a dictum of preserving, rather than cultivating,
language and culture. In this regard, things have in fact changed.
Though remnants of the same ideology are still engrained and
practiced in the instruction of Armenian language, the developing
Armenian Republic has found a permanent residence in the Armenian
cultural imaginary, testing the potency of the myth of return to
Western Armenia, and substituting it with the modern state of Armenia.
Against the backdrop of the Armenian Republic, with the Eastern
Armenian as its official language – in effect, its official form of
linguistic and cultural expression – what continues to be threatened,
perhaps now more than ever, is the Western form. Any hopes of its
salvation, or perhaps more realistically, the prolongation of its
survival falls within diaspora’s domain. But where is this
linguistic form to live and be cultivated, if not in literature? And
if so, who is to write and read this literature, if not the
generation of the students the teachers at the workshop were talking
about? In order to ensure that future generations have the
appropriate means for cultural expression, Armenian cultural
expression, we will need to change dramatically the institutional
practices that opt for "band-aid" solutions when it comes to Armenian
language and culture by shifting the priorities of the communities
that dictate them.
All Rights Reserved: Critics’ Forum, 2009. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.
Talar Chahinian is a Lecturer in the Department of Comparative
Literature at UCLA, where she recently received her Ph.D.
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