LOS ANGELES/YEREVAN — Tunik is an app that brings Armenian folklore to life for children; it is now available on Android, joining the iPhone and iPad app that launched earlier this year.
Built by a small Armenian team, Tunik narrates the stories generations of Armenian families grew up with. The narration is in Armenian, by native voices, and every tale is illustrated in the style of an animated film, so that a child in Glendale, Paris or Moscow can fall asleep to the same stories as a child in Yerevan.
For most children of the diaspora, bedtime is the only Armenian-language moment of the day. Tunik was designed to make that moment count. The library holds more than ninety illustrated stories, from the epic of Sasuntsi Davit to Hovhannes Tumanyan’s fables and new originals such as “September First,” a story about a boy’s first day of school that reached families this week.
Tunik’s newest feature shows the Armenian text word by word as the narrator speaks it, in the manner of karaoke, with an optional Latin transliteration for children and parents who understand Armenian but struggle with the alphabet. It was built for the family that wants their child to keep the language, not only to hear it.
Tunik carries no advertising, complies with COPPA, participates in Google Play’s Families program, and places nothing purchasable within a child’s reach. Stories can be downloaded for flights and road trips, and a bedtime timer lets the narration fade as the child falls asleep.
