Dialect vowel maintenance in a diglossic context: a study of linguistic heterogeneity in Gavaṛ, Armenia

Abstract This study uses variationist methods to assess whether three demographic factors (self-reported gender, birth year, education level) correlate with maintenance of previously described dialect vowels in Gavaṛ, Armenia. Some maintenance was found, contradicting previous claims about dialect leveling in Armenian cities. Specifically, in picture-naming and word-list data, men maintained some dialect vowels more than women, while the other two demographic predictors were not significant (though preliminary analysis of spontaneous speech suggests that age may also be relevant for dialect vowel maintenance in less monitored speech contexts). Participants’ positive attitudes toward both Standard Eastern Armenian and the local dialect, along with the lack of significant results for education level, are consistent with Armenia’s diglossic environment, suggesting that even some highly educated speakers use dialect features outside of formal domains. This result demonstrates the key role of local language ideologies, as social class has been found to predict use of standard variants in more well-studied Western contexts. Because the analysis included one allophonic phenomenon whose results showed idiosyncratic tendencies, the study also has implications for evaluating social meaning of phenomena with different phonological statuses.