How Gen Z Is Using TikTok to Save 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.)