A Map of Languages, Dead and Dying

I don’t speak the language of my parents, grandparents, and ancestors. But, it’s still a part of me. As a child, I ingested it like food, where it continues to live, as invisible and essential as my own breath, as fragile and temporary too.

My kids don’t know the sound. It is not the primal sound of mom and dad, nor the soundtrack of family life like it was for me. They aren’t surrounded by it, relatives speaking it, more comfortable, more themselves in this foreign language than they ever could be in the vernacular of America. Anywhere I am in the world, hearing those particular combinations of consonants and vowels feels like an embrace.

I don’t speak the language, but I wear it like a diamond, sometimes holding it up to the light to watch it shimmer. My attempts to pass on little bits of it to my kids―boy-girl twins, teenagers―like shards of some once-whole artifact, has its limits:

“This is how you say, bread: hatz.”

“This is how you say, book: keerk.”

“This is how you say school: tabrotz.

“How do you say school?” I say.

“Tabrotz,” they say, complying because they love me and want me to be happy. The fault isn’t theirs.

I once clicked on a map of nearly dead and dying languages, a New York Times interactive map telling the story of the many nearly dead and dying languages to be found in New York City. I read it from my home desk in Portland, Oregon, on the other side of the country. Still, I knew that my nearly dead and dying language, the one that I don’t speak, would be on that map. The earliest Armenian immigrants to the U.S. settled in New England. I searched the names ringing a map of Manhattan, forty-one languages with uncommon spellings, rare consonant combinations, odd spacing, accents and macrons over vowels, only to find mine, two thirds of the way around, pointing its bony finger at me: Western Armenian. I stared at the screen and sighed. What an accusation, this map, so clearly and publicly stating it in print. I am the killer. Guilty as charged, no trial needed. 

I have always protected my parents whom some might see as the real killers. I never called them out when the old country folks would grip my wrist with one hand while wagging a finger in my face with the other, lashed me with their tongues using a word that still lives on, will never die: Amot, Amot, Amot, Shame, Shame, Shame.

It would have been better to have stayed in our villages where we had been for thousands of years. We could have lived and loved and died, feasted and worshiped and shoush-bar’d (danced) in the same place for a thousand more. But that’s not what happened. We were driven out. Displaced. Survived. Decisions made for us. The fault isn’t theirs.

My parents could have chosen a different path, to live and raise me in a diasporan community. 

But they saw the writing on the wall, what was needed to ensure my success: the importance of being perceived as white in America and erasing all traces of foreignness in pursuit of belonging. I come from people who were good at seeing the writing on the wall or I wouldn’t be here. You can’t blame the survivors and their descendants for being good at surviving, can you? Can you?

The real killers are the real killers, of course: the ones that did the actual killing. An inevitable consequence of violent domination of one ethnicity over another is that the language dies too. A tale as old as time. As long as we make a fact out of the fiction of race or the need to make a hierarchy of groups of people, using different language and sets of customs as a reason for war, we are condemned to forever repeat this cycle.

I sometimes wonder if this very search to understand my family’s history, the context out of which I emerged, only feeds into this false sense of separateness. Perhaps it only doubles down on this “us vs. them” way of looking at the world, further entrenching the divides between us, based on the lie that we are somehow different from each other because we have this history or you have that one, we speak this language and you speak that one, we follow this set of customs and you follow that set of customs.

Armenians have been around a long time, have had kings and empires, been conquered and risen again, and been conquered again. We are known for being the first nation to adopt Christianity as a national religion, having done so in 301 AD. For about 600 hundred years, from 1300 to 1915, Armenians were the largest ethnic minority in the Ottoman Empire, living in ancestral villages, at relative peace with their Muslim neighbors. That is, until the early twentieth century, when the Empire was crumbling and the “Young Turk” government enacted a campaign to kill or expel all 2 million of us living in the region. The modern country of Turkey, born out of this violence, denies that their revered founders committed genocide to this day. Turkish citizens who publicly call it genocide face prosecution under laws criminalizing “insulting Turkishness,” Article 301 of the Turkish penal code.

One gift of my unusual upbringing, an erasure of the past to start anew, is that I didn’t grow up hating “the Turks.” Many of us were raised in Armenian communities where hating “the Turks” is normalized. In my family, there might have been a lot of talk about hating “the Turks,” but I just didn’t understand it. Hatreds are passed down through language.

Still, I had the images planted in my head by my grandmother and the documentaries about those who didn’t survive, of the young girls, for example, who jumped in the river, preferring to drown themselves rather than be raped and tortured by the soldiers, or kidnapped into slavery or marriage, forced to convert to Islam. No Armenian grows up without the images of anonymous skeletons, piles of skulls and rib cages that once had skin over them, muscle and fat, too. They once stood upright, and looked with their eyes at the same sky that I do. 

I think about the Holocaust, and the Khmer Rouge, the slaughter of the Rwandans, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, the Native peoples of America, and the enslaved from Africa upon whose suffering and death my country was built. How absurd to have believed the version they taught me at school.

I think about the perpetrators, not the Hitlers, the Talat Pashas, the Pol Pots, the Christopher Columbuses, but the footsoldiers who inherited the loot. The poison of violence, of genocide infects the perpetrators, too. I think about their descendants even though their ancestors stole everything from mine. Still, the psychic energy it takes to deny the truth, to hate the truthtellers, and to uphold a narrative that exonerates you. We are all victims of the state.

People died to preserve the very things I dismiss as “merely a set of customs”: religion and language. No amount of logic washes the blood off my hands. I am complicit because, while as a child I had no say in such things, now I am an adult and have chosen the comfort of my own individual life over the preservation of the language and the culture. That this choice is neither good nor bad, but the cost of survival, brings little solace.

***

My grandfather was orphaned by the genocide at nine years old. His parents and four sisters were killed. I discovered a trove of typewritten letters he wrote to my father at boarding school. They are written in perfect Western Armenian, likely better than it would have been if his family had lived. It is “free of Turkish borrowings,” according to the scholar I worked with to translate the letters. She recognized it as the kind taught at the orphanages by those who, after World War I, gathered the orphans from the streets, the deserts, the homes of Arab-speaking families, in a concerted effort to revive the Armenian national identity and prevent the language’s loss.

What I learned from those letters: my grandfather had big dreams for his sons. None of them were about preserving the culture and language. As someone who lived through it, who lost his entire family, he was driven less by a desire to preserve a culture and more by a need to ensure his descendants could live as if the past never happened, as if no one ever tried to destroy us or systematically wipe out our kind.

***

By the time I reached my early thirties, both of my parents had died: my father of a heart attack and my mother of cancer. Untethered and lost, unable to find my way forward, I followed an inner longing that drew me to seek closeness to a culture that I had always felt alienated by.

The day I walked into a crowd of Armenians in their twenties and thirties at a park in Pasadena, my first plunge into becoming part of an Armenian community, I knew what was waiting for me. We were all there to attend orientation, the first day of volunteering to become mentors—big brothers and big sisters—to Armenian youth in Glendale, the largest community of Armenians outside of the Republic of Armenia. I knew that I was like no Armenian that they had ever met, that they would approach me with suspicion, like encountering a mythological creature, like a centaur, while shopping in the frozen foods aisle at Jon’s Market: Are both of your parents Armenian? Did you grow up in Los Angeles? Where are your parents from again?  I knew they would see me as a novelty or, worse, an “odar,” a non-Armenian.

If there was one message from Armenians I had received loud and clear, it was that I wasn’t Armenian if I didn’t speak Armenian. But I was a full-grown adult at that point, thirty-five years old. I was at the age and period of life where my motivations were less about what other people thought. It wasn’t even about some obligation to create continuity with the past. It was about what I needed in the present: to learn more about the context out of which I had emerged, to claim an identity that had been denied me. My legitimacy was mine to establish. No one else’s. I didn’t need to speak Armenian in order to be Armenian.

It wasn’t on me to revive a dying language to justify my parents’ choices or my existence.

Still, I made a few runs at resuscitation.

The first Western Armenian language class I took was at Los Angeles Community College. It was taught by a friend of the family who let me audit. I was older than every other student by at least fifteen years. Some of the students were straight out of high school. It was a lot like sitting in a high school class, the kids coming in late, mostly the boys, stoned and unhurried, defiant. I wondered about them: was this an easy “A”? No, I later learned. Though most of my classmates had likely grown up speaking Armenian, they did not know how to read and write in it. I wondered if their antics, goofing around in the back of the classroom like middle schoolers, was a performance of not giving a shit, grown out of their own discomfort, a sense that they should already know all this, shame that they did not.

In some ways, we were the same, those kids and I.

I took an adult-learner class at Glendale Community College and met my first (and only) Armenophile: some guy who had fallen in love with the country, probably the women, truth to be told. Another class was full of odars, wives and husbands of Armenians who needed to impress  their in-laws.

I signed up for another class, and another class, and another, always learning a little bit more, though never enough to prevent its extinction, certainly not enough to earn a reprieve.

***

I dream sometimes of saviorhood, of being Dr. Frankenstein toiling away in the basement until I scream to the Heavens a triumphant “It’s alive!” like a wild-eyed Gene Wilder in the Mel Brooks spoof film Young Frankenstein. I think of all the black-and-white film adaptations of Mary Shelley’s book and even of a teenaged Shelley herself, who was on vacation with a couple of handsome, arrogant men in a mansion during an ashy, gray season when she wrote it. They challenged each other to write ghost stories.

Mary Shelley wrote about someone who wishes to resurrect the dead, to play God, exceeding human capability and, in doing so, destroys himself. Her story ends with Dr. Frankenstein chasing his creation, the monster, through the arctic, just as I chase this dead and dying language. 

Many speculate that Mary’s ghost story was inspired by her wish to resurrect her dead mother and dead child.

Was my pursuit of learning the language, living within the culture I had always felt alienated from, a wish to resurrect my dead mother? It’s true that I chased it until I reached a dead end and I was left with just myself, a human built from parts sewn together from the past and the present to make a whole.

Clever, young Mary, understood the consequences of trying to reverse nature. The choice: accept the inevitability of death or spend your life chasing a monster endlessly through the icy tundra.

The dying of my near-dead language is not a consequence of nature. Or is it? It is the result of a quest for dominance, another kind of playing God. Genocidal tendencies are part of our nature. Like it or not, this too is who we are, a species that, under the right combination of circumstances, will kill another group within the species in order to achieve dominance: a shot at immortality. We are all born into ghost stories.

Nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages are thought to be endangered. The map of dead and dying languages in New York City alone, the one that inspired this essay, included just forty-one of them, listed here in no particular order: Taíno, Mojave, Tlapenac, Gullah, Bété, Ebrié, Mam, Kaqchikel, Nahuatl, P’urhépecha, Balti, Bartangi, Moroccan Judeo-Arabic, Sorani Kurdish, Chamorro, Haketia, West Ambae, Palauan, Marshalese, Chuukese, Nauaran, Pangasinan, Rusyn, Syrian Judeo-Arabic, Cherokee, Lenape, Judeo-Spanish, Lakota, Kumeyaay, Māori, Gilbertese, Scottish Gaelic, Bukhori, Irish, Zaza, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican Sign Language, Garifuna, Mahou and Western Armenian.

Western Armenian is on the endangered list because of the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman government, led by the “Young Turks” who are known for having overthrown the sultanate and for founding modern Turkey. There is no country in which Western Armenian is the official language. It is spoken by diasporan Armenians all over the world―for now. 1.5 million people still speak it, though that number is shrinking fast due to “interruptions in intergenerational transmission,” according to UNESCO.

My father-in-law’s Sephardic Jewish ancestors were expelled from Spain. They settled in Thessaloniki, Greece. He told me recently that the view of the Young Turks found in my writing was a revelation since, growing up, he was taught that the Young Turks were heroes, ushering in an era of modernization to the region. It makes sense that this would have been the dominant narrative in areas of the former Ottoman Empire. History, after all, is told by the victors. The dead can’t speak.

***

A poster of the alphabet, all thirty-six of its curvy letters, hangs on my wall. It is beautifully framed with double matting. I bought an even bigger poster when I visited the Republic of Armenia twenty years ago. It’s still rolled up and in a tube. I vow to frame that one too; the letters forever preserved, under glass, never to fade, the gorgeous swirls printed in deep, middle ages-looking colors, inky and fresh, always. I will remember him, Mesrob Mashdots, the alphabet’s inventor, and honor him and his role in preventing our extinction.

The language and the church were the only reasons we didn’t perish altogether, so I say to my kids:

“This is how you say, bread: hatz.”

“This is how you say, book: keerk.”

“This is how you say, school: tabrotz.

“How do you say school?” I say.

“Tabrotz,” they say.

“This is how you say, How are you?: Eench bes es?

“This is how you say, I love you: Kez geh seerem.  

“This is how you say, Thank you: Shnoragalutyoon.

“Really?!” they say, laughing at the sounds.

“Yes!” I say. “Isn’t that a great word? It’s one of my favorites: Shnoragalutyoon.”

“How do you say thank you?” I say.

“Shnoragalutyoon,” they say.