Journal ArticleOpen Access
Jrbashyan, Ashkhen, 2026
Բանբեր Երևանի համալսարանի. Բանասիրություն / Bulletin of Yerevan University B: Philology, Vol. 17, No. 2(50), pp. 6–25; DOI 10.46991/BYSU.B/2026.17.2.006
Jrbashyan examines principled differences between Eastern and Western Armenian versification that surfaced from the mid-nineteenth century, when the vernacular was being made into a literary medium and the phonetic and accentual divergence of the two branches began shaping poetic form. Syllabic verse formed in the tenth to twelfth centuries had bequeathed rules later codified in Mekhitarist theory. The central question was the rhythm-forming role of stable stress in the poetic line: the Mekhitarists required stress to mark the caesura, while late nineteenth-century Eastern Armenian poetry abandoned that requirement in favour of syllabic equality. She concludes that Western Armenian syllabic verse is an intermediate form combining stress and syllabic principles.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Manoukian, Jennifer, 2025
Études arméniennes contemporaines, No. 16 (2025), Varia, pp. 147–181 (Bibliothèque Nubar / AGBU); DOI 10.4000/15gmi
Manoukian, a historian of the modern Western Armenian language, challenges two widely held assumptions in Armenian studies about nineteenth-century Ottoman Armenian schooling: that the Armenian National Constitution and its National Education Council were transformative reformers of Armenian education, and that Armenian schools spread Modern Western Armenian from the outset. Drawing on primary sources from Constantinople, she shows that Armenian-language instruction in this period stayed wedded to Classical Armenian (grabar), complicating the standard story of a smooth rise of the modern vernacular.
Journal ArticlePaywalled
Toparlak, Tabita, 2024
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Vol. 54, No. 1, pp. 445–478 (Cambridge University Press); DOI 10.1017/S0025100323000130
A phonetic description ('Illustration of the IPA') comparing two major Armenian standards: Yerevan Eastern Armenian and Beirut Western Armenian. Situates Armenian as an independent Indo-European branch descending from fifth-century Classical Armenian and surveys its modern dialect families and speaker communities. Notes UNESCO's listing of Western Armenian as endangered and the diaspora's language-promotion efforts across the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, including communities formed by Genocide survivors and Syrian-war refugees.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Kelly, Niamh E. · Keshishian, Lara, 2021
Nordic Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 103–129 (Cambridge University Press); DOI 10.1017/S0332586521000093
The literature describes Western Armenian as contrasting voiceless aspirated with voiced stops, but since no monolingual Western Armenian community exists, every speaker is a bilingual in a minority-language setting. The study compares two heritage communities: Beirut, where the majority language is Arabic, and the US, where it is English. Lebanese speakers contrast voiced with voiceless unaspirated stops, matching Lebanese Arabic. US speakers were more variable: some showed the English pattern, others kept aspirated voiceless stops but varied within the voiced series. The authors read this as transfer from the majority language in both communities, producing two divergent voicing systems inside one heritage language.
