Since Spring 2024, the Armenian Language in the Bay Area Project (ALBA) has been conducting interviews with members of the Armenian community across the San Francisco Bay area. Julianne Kapner, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, created ALBA to further her research on the evolution of Western Armenian and to compile a collection of recordings for future linguistic studies. As a strong advocate for the involvement of undergraduate students in academic research,coupled with her unfamiliarity with the language at the time, Kapner quickly enlisted the help of Armenian-speaking students, training them in the practices of sociolinguistic interviews. In affiliation with the Armenian Studies Program (ASP), student researchers could enroll up to 3 units in a ‘Supervised Group Study’ administered through the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department or the Undergaduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) administered through Berkeley Linguistics. Over the course of one year, ALBA has generated immense excitement within the Armenian community, resulting in their 50th interview conducted by the student team at the end of the Fall 2024 semester.
In recognition of this great accomplishment, I invited ALBA to speak about their experiences, as well as their perspectives on the progression and future of the project. The team consists of nine student researchers in total, and I was able to interview Kapner, Sarine Baronian, Joseph Tertzakian-Harris, and Ernest Baghdasaryan.
“The beginning of ALBA is a long and funny story,” said Julianne Kapner.
Coupled with her long-lasting interest in studying endangered languages and an experience with a student that urged her to look at Armenian, Kapner stated that Western Armenian naturally “[fit her] criteria.” Alongside the support from her colleagues in the Linguistics Department, Kapner gave great credit to ASP in kickstarting her research. “Reaching out to Dr. Derderian and meeting with Dr. Douzjian helped get our word out to the diaspora community in the Bay Area,” she said. She admitted to not being completely familiar with the Armenian language and was greatly surprised by the attitude of the community surrounding her research. Concurrently, she was excited to work with undergraduate students, stating how she had always wanted to take on this opportunity and that this project would bring her closer to achieving those goals.
“I want this project to make something that isn’t mine,” said Kapner when asked to sum up the goal of her study. Conjointly, ALBA aims to “understand how the Armenian language varies across social identities and how it may be changing in the Bay Area.” Although Kapner explained that while she had primarily been focusing on Western Armenian, “a month in,” she decided that including all Armenian speakers in her study would be more efficient. Additionally, Kapner upheld the “uniqueness” of researching Armenian within the realm of sociolinguistics, which is predominantly saturated by studies in English or a “small set of languages.” With this in mind, Kapner signaled that another raison d’être of ALBA is “to create a corpus of recordings of Bay Area Armenian for future linguistic, historical, and anthropological research.”
Anxious to begin interviews and kickstart her project, Kapner explained how in the early stages, she had a sense of weariness or skepticism surrounding the reception of the Armenian community. However, these feelings would not last as ALBA would quickly be inundated by requests and people from across the Bay Area wanting to be heard and interviewed. “I bump into Armenian people non-affiliated with Berkeley asking me if I’m the one who runs that project,” she said. To advertise her project, Julianne went to "every single Armenian event and walked up to random people" in hopes of garnering interest. She also gave great credit to St Vartan’s Armenian Apostolic Church in Oakland for allowing her to table at their annual Food Festival, which in turn propagated the project even further by word-of-mouth. Deviating from Kapner’s sentiment and confirming the opinion of the community, student researcher Sarine Baronian stated that when she initially joined the project, she was “optimistic” and didn’t have any doubts about its success, stating that “Armenians love to share their stories and opinions.”
Concerning the fifty-interview milestone, I learned that at the beginning of the project, the aim was set at thirty participants, but after hitting that number, Kapner quickly realized she could and should aim for more. “In quantitative analysis, with the more people you interview, the more opportunities you have to run statistics on different subgroups and samples,” she said.
Kapner then familiarized me with what it’s like to be part of the ALBA team and what the interview process entails. First, Western or Eastern Armenian speaking participants are respectively matched with student researchers who speak their dialect. Secondly, interviews are broken up into three distinct sections: a sociolinguistic interview conducted in Armenian in which participants could share their past experiences, an oral questionnaire conducted in English, and a word list that participants have to read outloud at the end of the interview. Alongside interviews, student-researchers transcribe recordings using linguistic software and meet for weekly meetings to talk about the progress of the project.
“I want to give this data back to the people we took it from while prioritizing analysis and my candidacy…I also want students to use this data as a foundation for an honors thesis or other project that will be as equally beneficial to them as it is to me,” she explained.
With these sentiments, the team will now shift to prioritize and expand their collection that is being housed in UC Berkeley’s California Language Archive.
Julianne also shared some preliminary findings and expressed great interest in the sound of the vowel ‘ieu’ or (իւ). “For example, participants who speak Turkish say it in a different way than those who don’t, while French speakers, who I’d expect to say it differently, have no impact on their Armenian pronunciation of the vowel,” Kapner said.
After speaking with Kapner I shifted my attention to the student-researchers who had so much positivity to share about their time in the project so far. “ALBA gave me the opportunity to meet Armenians from all walks of life… it broadened my perspective of Armenian people in general,” said student researcher Ernest Baghdasaryan. “I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and moved to California without speaking a word of Armenian…ALBA allowed me to learn the language in a year,” said Joseph Tertzakian-Harris. Additionally, Sarine Baronian commended the project’s structure by saying how it “exposed [her] to a whole new life [she] wouldn’t have explored without it. ”Beyond Kapner’s original goals, the students also saw great merit in the potential outcomes for the project; for example, Tertzakian-Harris saw it as a means of “keeping alive” the Armenian culture, and Baghdasaryan as a way of “bringing in more diversity with Armenian people.”
Kapner’s vision became clearer when she said, “I went to graduate school because I wanted to work with undergrads…and I designed this project to be able to do so.” The students unanimously agreed that the hands-on experience of doing linguistics research has been a great experience for them, grounded in a mentorship between them and Kapner. Tertzakian-Harris exemplified this well by saying, “It’s nice to have a mentor that helps you in your undergraduate studies as well as one that familiarizes you with graduate studies.”
The student-researchers also shared their most memorable experiences. For Tertzakian-Harris, it was when he spoke to Henry from Henry’s Coffee in San Francisco, stating that “he was very hospitable and gave [him] free coffee.” For Baronian, it was the thrill of going into an interview “blind,” without knowing anything about the person she’d be speaking to for the next couple of hours. For Baghdasaryan, it was his comparative observations: “It was interesting collecting data that showed a difference between members of the same generation, rather than looking at how [the] Armenian [language] shifted from one generation to the next.”
“ALBA pushed me out of my comfort zone and expanded my communication skills,” said Baronian, who admitted to growing up shy and having “difficulty communicating with people [she] wasn’t comfortable with.”
Similarly, Baghdasaryan stated how ALBA taught him how to be empathetic in these environments: “[Doing interviews] you have to be able to both listen and ask questions relevant to the data you are collecting…it will be useful for me as I plan to go into law where getting information out of individuals is important.”
“ALBA made me more comfortable with my identity of being Armenian no matter what anyone might say,” said Tertzakian-Harris, praising ALBA’s objectives in extending its influence beyond the academic realm.
Likewise, Baghdasaryan shared how ALBA reaffirmed his passion for serving the Armenian community, emphasizing his desire to be more involved when he leaves Berkeley.
If you are interested in participating or joining ALBA, please contact Julianne Kapner via email: julianne_kapner@berkeley.edu.
You can also learn more about the project by clicking here