Jasmine Dum-Tragut
University of Salzburg, Austria

Migration – integration – social network: Armenian varieties in the 21st century – or the development of a new variety?

Keywords: Modern Armenian vernaculars; convergence; mixed registers; internet language.

In the recent years, the situation of the pluricentric language Armenian has continued to change: although the dominance of Eastern Armenian has remained more or less unchallenged being the sole state language, the majority language and a multi-functional variety both in the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Karabakh, the number of speakers of Eastern Armenian has drastically decreased due to large-scale emigration.

The emigration of Eastern Armenians, especially to the West, has thus led to an intensive socio-cultural-linguistic encounter of migrants speaking Eastern Armenian and long-established Diaspora communities speaking Western Armenian.

On the other hand, driven out from their traditional settlements in the Middle East by political conflicts, war and terrorism, speakers of Western Armenians seek asylum not only in Western countries, but also in the Armenian homeland, in the Republic of Armenia. This resulted in a new conflict situation in the Republic Armenia, mainly caused by the enrollment of “other” Armenian migrant children speaking a “different Armenian” and by Western Armenian job-seekers. In the traditional Diaspora, meanwhile, similar problems arose with Eastern Armenian children in Diaspora schools and the need to install also teaching in Eastern Armenian.

The European and American diaspora, however, is faced with a new generation of Armenians growing up with and acquiring both Western and Eastern Armenian, even learning both standards in school. This generation apparently develops not only a new, multi-registered knowledge of “Armenian” in general, but also represents a potential for linguistic convergences: a new, mixed oral, semi-public variety of Armenian is gradually evolving. This is mainly a consequence of the need of migrants to integrate into an existing Armenian community, often by means of social networks, even on Internet, such as Facebook or Twitter.

In the paper demographic changes and their impact on linguistic divergence or convergence phenomena will be discussed. The new convergence caused by the communicative needs with \"other\" Armenians has resulted in some new forms of Armenian, some “mixed registers” – particularly in youth and internet language. This state of affairs will be illustrated by examples from youth language, mainly on Facebook.