"How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?": A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles
Karapetian, Shushan · 2014
Introduces Armenian, specifically Eastern Armenian in Los Angeles, into the landscape of heritage languages in the United States, filling a gap in both heritage-language research and Armenian studies. It assesses the linguistic landscape of Armenians in Los Angeles, including the presence and use of the language and the visible signs of its loss, then examines incomplete acquisition among heritage speakers across phonology, morphology, register, and English borrowings, proposing domains of linguistic compartmentalization to describe patterns of use. A central finding concerns the persistent anxiety attached to speaking the heritage language and the damaging cycle that anxiety produces. The study closes on the inconsistent attitudes and beliefs surrounding Armenian, analyzed through competing majority and minority language ideologies. Data come from a corpus of in-depth interviews with college-age Eastern Armenian heritage learners.
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Karapetian, Shushan 2014. "How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?": A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles. PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles; eScholarship. Winner, Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award.
What this offers a reader
If you have ever felt embarrassed about your Armenian, this dissertation is about you, and it is free to download.
Award-winning UCLA dissertation; the foundational empirical study of Armenian heritage-language attrition in the US.
The evidence base for every argument we make about why our schools and language programs matter.
Why so many Armenian-Americans feel their Armenian is 'broken', and what that does to a language.
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