Mixed: Turkish–Armenian language contact and its invisibilization

Abstract This article strives to offer the historical sociolinguistic context needed to understand the use of Turkish loanwords in the informal Western Armenian spoken today. It does so by proposing a new framing for pre-twentieth-century Armenian dialects that underscores their openness to contact-induced change. This new framing aims to counter purist currents in scholarly and popular discourses that have treated loanwords in Armenian – Turkish and otherwise – as examples of corruption, contamination, and perversion, thereby vilifying them and erasing awareness of their longstanding normalcy and ubiquity in spoken varieties of Armenian. I begin by delving into this study’s contributions to two distinct audiences: historical sociolinguists and scholars of Armenian history and linguistics. After a brief overview of Armenian dialects in the nineteenth century, I draw on insights from contact linguistics and on a corpus of largely untapped Armenian-language materials to draw attention to contact features in one of the most well-documented Armenian dialects of the Ottoman Empire: the Armenian dialect of Istanbul. Here I focus specifically on Turkish contact features found at the lexical level in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and illustrate how studying them can offer historians new lines of inquiry and entry points into the largely unexplored social histories of Armenians in the Ottoman capital and beyond. I end with a brief look at how Ottoman Armenian intellectuals actively worked to stigmatize, pathologize and invisibilize Turkish contact features in the second half of the nineteenth century and how the ideologies they invented continue to shape the way many Western Armenian speakers use and think about language today.