The Armenian Language in the Bay Area Project (ALBA)

I am the director and founder of the Armenian Language in the Bay Area Project (ALBA), which forms the basis for my dissertation research. The project has four main goals:

• To create a public archive/corpus of recordings of Bay Area Armenian for future linguistic, historical, and anthropological research;

• To create opportunities for UC Berkeley undergraduate students to engage with the Armenian language and culture through research;

• To understand how the Armenian language varies across social identities, and how it may be changing in the Bay Area; and

• To generate findings which can support and promote existing efforts to maintain the (Western) Armenian language.

So far, we have recorded oral history interviews with 61 members of the Bay Area Armenian community. In August 2024, we launched our public archive through the California Language Archive, available here. We will continue to release recordings and transcripts to the archive as we transcribe them.

At the moment, we are focusing on transcribing and archiving our existing recordings. In addition, I am currently using the recordings we have collected for a sociophonetic study of Armenian as it is spoken in the Bay Area. I also plan to complete an analysis of language attitudes and use in this population, based on a metalinguistic survey administered as part of this project. I hope that my findings will be useful both to linguists and non-linguists alike, shedding light on patterns of pronunciation and providing insights for future language revitalization efforts.

We have so far had eight Armenian undergraduate students worked on the project, earning course credit in Linguistics and Armenian Studies, as well as six non-Armenian linguistics students. These students are honing their Armenian language skills and getting hands-on research experience, as well as authorship on the published collection.

This project is supported by the UC Berkeley Armenian Studies Program, the UC Berkeley Department of Linguistics, and by the Oswalt Endangered Language Fund.

If you are interested in participating in this project or helping to spread the word, please see our flyers below! We also just launched a newsletter; you can sign up here to receive it.

I recently gave two conference presentations about this project; if you'd like more information, you can check out the slides here and here.

The project was also recently featured in an article published on the UC Berkeley Armenian Studies website.