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.  To my knowledge, this project is the first study of Armenians in the Bay Area in over seventy years, and the first to investigate Eastern and Western Armenian together as one speech community.

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 sociolinguistic and phonetic study of Armenian as it is spoken in the Bay Area. I have just completed a study of the vowel systems of Bay Area Armenian to understand the variation present in this community and attempt to explain it.  I am now working on 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 ten Armenian undergraduate students working 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. A component of my dissertation research is to explore the impacts of participation in ALBA on these students' language experience.

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 have 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.

Frequently Asked Questions about ALBA

• Q: Are you still accepting students as research assistants?

A: Yes! Please send me an email and we can talk about whether this might be a good fit for you. Our prerequisites to enroll are a "B" or better in Linguistics 100 and/or spoken and written proficiency in Armenian (any variety).

• Q: Are you still accepting study participants for oral history interviews?

A: We have almost entirely wrapped up our oral history interviews, and are focusing instead on archiving and transcription. However, if you have a specific story that you feel very strongly about sharing, feel free to reach out and we  will do our best to make an interview happen.

• Q: What varieties of Armenian are you interested in? Do you only focus on Western Armenian or only focus on Eastern Armenian? What about Iranian Armenian/Persian Armenian/Barsgahayeren/Parskahayeren)?

A: We are interested in all varieties of Armenian: standard and non-standard, from any region of the homeland or diaspora. The unifying aspect is connection to the Bay Area.

• Q: Do you need to be fluent to participate?

A: No! We accept all fluencies of interview participants. However, we have already mostly closed our interviews for now. If you want to participate as a research assistant, you will need to have at least basic literacy in some variety of Armenian (be able to read the alphabet) and some conversational skills.

• Q: How can I learn more?

A: Sign up for our newsletter via the link above, or send me an email!