Learning Armenian In the Fourth Generation

It was around this time that I learned the history of why some Armenians didn’t speak Armenian and some did. And I’m not talking about those who were completely assimilated and forgot about being Armenian. I mean those who, like my parents and their friends, remained extremely active in the Armenian community. It happened this way. Those who had come to America early on, including many survivors, gave birth to a generation of children born in the US in the 1920s – my grandparents’ generation. Having immigrant Armenian parents who didn’t speak English very well, for the most part they grew up speaking only Armenian in the house. They didn’t learn English until they went to kindergarten. Of course, in the 1930s there was no such thing as an Armenian day school or kindergarten in the States. Apparently, the culture shock that ensued when they first had to learn English was a bad experience for them. They were called “foreigners” and insulting names, and made to feel like lesser people by the dominant WASP society. When they grew up and had kids of their own in the 1950s, their hurt Armenian pride made them, like me, defiant to the outside world and they plunged themselves into Armenian community life. But they didn’t want their children to feel like “foreigners” as they had, so the vast majority, active or not, chose not to speak Armenian to their children in the home. They wanted to prove they were genuine Americans, but at the same time, they were loyal to most of the other Armenian traditions, in particular, the church. In this way my parents and their generation grew up in a happy, loving Armenian-American environment although they spoke English as their native tongue. I should note that due to the immigration quotas in place from 1924-1965, growing up in the 1960s, there were few Armenians coming in from other countries, and therefore there were very few people my parents’ age who did speak Armenian. Not knowing Armenian was considered normal. And so, when they raised me and my generation, they attempted to do it the same way their parents had raised them. The only problem was, in the meantime tons of Armenian refugees had poured in from the Middle East, and they were having kids too. Those kids were my age, and though they were lucky enough to learn Armenian from their parents, some of them also inherited the idea that those who hadn’t were sood. As the group with American-born parents grew up alongside the group with foreign-born parents, the cultural clash was inevitable.

I further learned that the concept of Armenians who didn’t speak Armenian didn’t start in America. I found out that in Ottoman Turkey, there were whole towns, villages, and regions where the Armenians only spoke Turkish. Kayseri (Gesaria) was notorious for this, as was Yozghat. These were two backgrounds that were common among my fourth-generation peers in Detroit. Nobody in the old country had suggested that Armenians from Gesaria were not real Armenians because they didn’t speak the language. They knew very well they were Armenian and they were devout members of the Armenian Church. They too, were murdered in the Genocide. But the most irritating piece of information was this: the majority of the Armenian population of Lebanon and Syria hailed from Cilicia, and most of the Armenian urban communities in Cilicia were Turkish-speaking, such as Adana, Aintab, and so on, and others spoke unintelligible dialects from places like Zeitoun and Kessab. They didn’t speak this language in the Old Country, they learned it in Beirut. In truth, it is an amazing accomplishment of the Lebanese and Syrian Armenian communities that they were able to form a strong Armenian school system and teach Standard Western Armenian to this group of people who almost all spoke only Turkish or some rural dialect. They actually revived a language in the Diaspora, which defies all odds. But unfortunately, this seems to have been partially accomplished by shaming those who didn’t speak Armenian, for example with the slogan “Turkeren khosoghin, hayeren badaskhaneh.” This not only led to conflict when the Lebanese Armenians later migrated to America, but it was historically inaccurate. How could a Lebanese Armenian claim that only the Armenian speakers were real Armenians, when their own grandparents spoke nothing but Turkish? Were their grandparents Turks, then? And on top of that, they were saying this to the Armenian-Americans, most of whose grandparents came from the provinces of Kharpert, Sepastia, and Dikranagerd, all solidly Armenian speaking areas, Kharpert dialect being one of the closest to “standard.”

But knowing this, I still wanted to learn Armenian. Our folk music and our badarak, which I loved, were sung in that language. It didn’t make you a “real” Armenian either way, but it held the key to a deeper understanding of our culture. We have books upon books written in Armenian, and they are not ever going to all be translated into English. In those books are the riches of our culture. And we can say the same about folk songs and even everyday conversation, the feel, the rhythm, the idiomatic phrases of the language. And what about visiting Armenia? What about speaking Armenian to visitors from overseas? What about passing on our heritage for goodness’ sake!

And so, when I went to college at the University of Michigan, I took four semesters of Modern Western Armenian under one of the greatest living scholars of the language, a product himself of the Armenian schools of the Middle East, Prof. Kevork Bardakjian. I put more effort into it than any of my other classes. After all, it was undergrad, and people said it was the time to “take whatever classes you like.” I frequently called my grandmother to get her take on some of the phrases, because I wanted generational transmission to be an important part of my learning the language. By the end of the two years, I could read, write, and speak Armenian at something like an elementary school level.

I continued my education. I was fortunate to find my grandfather’s Armenian Saturday School textbook, and I was even more fortunate that it was Roupen Zartarian’s reader Meghraked. Unlike most Armenian children’s textbooks, this used colorful yet simple language, was written by a major literary figure, and because it was written before the Genocide it had a historical value that made it very interesting to me. Since I was a history buff, and since my family hadn’t really read Armenian since the 1920s, my identification with the Armenian language was tied in not with the Diaspora, but with pre-1915 Anatolia.

Zartarian was born in Kharpert (where two of my great-grandparents were born) and considered a member of the “provincial” school of Western Armenian literature. His numerous old-fashioned words, and his short folktales written in verse with some dialect and Turkish words and folk song-like rhymes enthralled me. And I was ecstatic when I found a reference to the Tamzara, written by someone who undoubtedly witnessed that old Western Armenian folk dance many times in its original form on its home soil.