Bert Vaux is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at Harvard University. Beginning in the Fall, Professor Vaux will begin teaching at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He is the Editor of Oxford Surveys in Generative Phonology and the Editor of the Annual of Armenian Linguistics journal. He has published The Phonology of Armenian (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Introduction to Linguistic Field Methods (Lincom Europa, 1999), along with articles such as "Syllabification in Armenian, Universal Grammar, and the Lexicon," "Feature Spreading and the Representation of Place of Articulation," and "The Laryngeal Specifications of Fricatives" in Linguistic Inquiry and "Notes on the Armenian Dialect of Ayntab" in the Annual of Armenian Linguistics. In addition to his work on the Armenian language, Vaux has mapped America's dialects and has been featured in articles by the Harvard Gazette, Boston Globe, Associated Press, and elsewhere such as "Standing on line at the bubbler with a hoagie in my hand," "It's still a mahk of distinction: The accent sets Bostonians apart," and "The great pop vs. soda controversy." The Harvard Crimson also reported in February 2003 that his dialects class was the second largest at the college. This interview was conducted on Tuesday, June 17, 2003. A mutual colleague, Hagop Hachikian of Watertown, MA, also participated in the interview.

JS: And you are also in a music group?
BV: Yes, though it's hard to play with them now, because they are all in Washington, DC. Interestingly, the singer in that band is now the legal counsel for the House Committee on East Asian Affairs. Until the previous election, he was with the Subcommittee on International Human Rights, which drafted the Genocide Resolution. He worked on writing it, and I let him know where to look to find the relevant primary documents. He also sent me a copy of Clinton's letter, threatening the House Speaker to take it off the agenda. It's pretty damning. It says overtly that we have economic and military interests in Turkey. Normally they don't say that so overtly.

JS: I understand this is not your first visit to the Hairenik. You met with the previous editor, Vahakn Karakashian, to work on some of your research?
BV: Yes, we worked on the Vakif subdialect of Musaler many years ago, maybe 10 years ago. I haven't seen him since then.

JS: He is now the editor of Horizon in Montreal.
BV: There are a lot of Musalertsi's there, right? My best informant ever is from one of the villages there. He is a shoemaker and he lives in Watertown.
I use a dialect collection manual from Yerevan that is custom made for working with dialect informants, and no one has ever known every word in
that book except for him. But he has the profession closest to what they have in mind, because they ask things about farm implements and things
around the traditional house.

JS: How did you get involved with Armenian linguistics?
BV: I started at the University of Chicago, where they have a partially-funded chair in Armenian Studies, so they have a rotating person. My freshman year it was Abraham Terian from Jerusalem, and he now runs the St. Nersess Seminary. He's one of the few that still writes in Western Armenian-there aren't many academics like that at this point. It was just the two of us, and I loved taking classes with him. I had done it because it belongs to the Indo-European family, which was the language family I was working on at the time, but I found that I enjoyed it on its own merits. It was so different than all the other languages in the family. Then I heard about the program from the University of Michigan that goes to Armenia, and I did that. That's where I met Robert Krikorian. Then I went again the next year, in 1990. It was after the earthquake and right before the fall of the Soviet Union, so all of the protests were going on. It was an exciting time. I realized it was something I would like to do for a long time, so I applied to Harvard to work with Robert Thomson, and I enjoyed that. He was very efficient, and again it was just me in 1990. With him, you had to do all the preparation and all the translation yourself. He would only correct you if you got something wrong. So that was really good for getting better at Classical Armenian. Then I did the program in Venice, and I enjoyed that a lot. People in the group were actually speaking Armenian,
while the Michigan group were American-Armenians, so they didn't. When Thomson left, I started working more on dialects and things I could do on my own that no one else did. By then I had built up enough of an Armenian network that I could meet people, mainly through Hagop Hachikian, though we started a bit later, and Harry Parsegian. They knew a lot of people, so once I met them, the rest was very easy. Since that time I have been trying to document all of the dialects that are preserved around here, which is a large percentage of the ones that are still alive. But we're not so good on the Persian Armenian dialects here, compared to California. When I go there for the UCLA conferences, I visit the older Persian Armenian speakers in the community with Anahid Keshishian.

JS: So you started off in the Armenian Studies Program at Harvard?
BV: I was in linguistics, but I came here to do Armenian. Then I got a job teaching in the Linguistics Department here in 1994.

JS: Is it a large Linguistics Department at Harvard?
BV: No. It's been on the decline since the 1950s. It's probably going to be eliminated within the next 2-3 years. They tried once 10 years ago, but
certain things happened. We had one professor in our department who had incredible political clout because he's been here since 1950. But he just
left, so the next time they try the department will not survive.

JS: It looks like a lot of your linguistics work is fun, from regional dialects in the US to studying the Boston accent. It is interesting for a general audience.
BV: It's all the same for me-the English dialects, the Armenian ones. It's all about the interesting aspects that every human has. One of the things that appealed to me, when I first went into academia and didn't know its dark side, was the egalitarian aspect of it. At my college, everyone went by their first name. There was no Doctor or Professor. And in linguistics, they preach something I believe in, which is that all humans are equal and all languages are equal. And when you study them, you see that they all have equally complex structures. Once I discovered that all people were equally interesting, then I could work with anyone I wanted.
I especially enjoy working with elderly people, who are the best with older forms of dialects. They have something that I think is very valuable, that the younger people don't have anymore, and I find it intellectually interesting to hear these dialects that I have read about in 19th century books but you can't hear on the street. And they get a lot of enjoyment out of it because they are typically alone, feeling abandoned. And humans are taught that speaking a non-standard dialect is a sign of lesser intellect, which isn't true. It comes out of bias against the working class, the rural, the poor, and the uneducated. But having education is largely a byproduct of one's social class. When we are five, we don't say we are going to have a better education. It's something your family arranges for you, and that's a product of who they are and how much money they have available.
    I also discovered as I went into academia that there is a dark side, which is very hierarchical. People are extremely sensitive to who's senior to who, and who's smarter than who. This shows up in the Armenian Studies world too, like everywhere else. People are very concerned with showing that their research is respectable, and that typically means that they'll write in a way that is opaque, that is not enjoyable to read, and that does not make immediate sense to the average reader. One thing I like about the linguistics work is that I can present things that are interesting to everyone and intellectually valid, without the need for the pretentious trappings to protect yourself from accusations of being a simpleton. It's very gratifying to be at the UCLA conferences, and to be able to talk about the dialects of Kayseri or what have you and have everyone in the audience nodding in recognition and pleasure at hearing something they can follow.

JS: I noticed that when you presented your work in Nagorno Karabagh, you showed photographs of the people and described your personal experiences
with them that the audience can relate to. You make it more of a human thing, while my impression of linguistics has been that it is a very technical science, very theoretical, like studying mathematics or logic.
BV: You are right about linguistics today-Chomskyan linguistics dominates the field. That's what my training is in, and I do that sort of work, which is important too. One of the things that can be done to promote Armenian Studies is show that the Armenian materials are relevant to what regular academics do, like theory. So I do that also, but I think there needs to be more than that, which is some of the other work I was telling you about. Noam Chomsky is actually very interested in individuals, but when people ask him about the connection between his linguistics thinking and his political thinking, he has said many times that there isn't any. But as I see it, they are intimately connected. He's a sort of Marxist, anarchist, populist type, and his work in linguistics is based on this idea that the object of study
should be the individual, and all individuals are equal, which fits in directly with his political thinking, and the same analytical techniques can be used for both. So, conceptually what I do in the dialect realm and with the Karabagh work is directly connected to the Chomskyan work-valuing the individual over the group, and so on. But you are right that in practice, people like Chomsky don't deal with actual individuals-it's all just notation.
    But it's so striking when you go to Karabagh-the social situation, the conditions that people live in there in the villages. It makes you want to talk about it, and I feel like it is something that would be of great interest to the audience, so why abstract away from that?

JS: So when you are working with people in the community, how do you approach them? When you hear someone speaking Armenian, do you listen to
what dialect they are speaking, and if it is of interest you approach them and ask for an interview?
BV: I like to listen. Around here I will just listen to what people are saying. But if you have a specific need, like if I read that there is something interesting in the Marash dialect and I need someone that speaks it, then I'll just ask around. But then it's tricky, because most people speak more than one variety of their own language, and then Armenians typically speak other languages too. And it's very difficult to get them to speak their non-standard dialect when they know that it is being studied by a professor. They tend, willingly or unwillingly, to go into something more literary. It's true for speakers of any language, not just Armenian. So I try to do a combination of having one or more other dialect speakers with them, so they can speak with each other. It is also good to have someone funny or interesting around to distract them or give something back to them in terms of the flow of the conversation.
    In Karabagh, I worked with an anthropologist, Nona Shahnazarian, who is from Karabagh and is female. We would go to areas that we suspected had interesting dialects, and we would walk from house to house and say hello, which you can do there as you probably know. We would get a sense of whether they used a hardcore dialect or not. If they did, then we would see if we could come in and talk some more, which we always could. My partner would ask them her
anthropological questions, which was good because it was non-linguistic, and she would ask them in Karabagh dialect. That invariably got them to respond
in their dialect. At the same time, the professors from the dialect institute in Yerevan were going around the same villages, and they said they couldn't find any dialect speakers. I saw them in action with one man whom we had worked with, who spoke a certain village dialect. They asked him, "how do you say this?" He
said the dialect word for it, and they said "no, it should be this," and they would cite a form of that word from several hundred years before. He would be taken aback, and then he would answer the next question with a standard Armenian form, and after that it was all standard. So they got standard Eastern Armenian from everyone.

JS: What exactly are you looking for when you go in and talk with these people? What are you doing with the research?
BV: I am doing many different things. I want to record as much as I can of people talking freely, connective speech. Right now for the dialects, all we
have are descriptions from the 19th century, which maybe have a few texts, but they are never analyzed so you don't know what they are saying and you
don't know what they sound like. I want to have the primary materials available, so people in the future can hear what they sound like. I also have particular things that I am looking into, that are of theoretical interest to linguists, but they are sort of obscure. I want to prepare grammars of each of these dialects, the way [Hrachea] Adjarian did for a lot of them from the 1890s through the 1950s. He covered about 15 of them, but there are hundreds of them. They could be grouped
together into 30-50 books, but each one would have to be very large to cover all of the sub-varieties. I want to do that, in English, and analyze the texts.
    But in Armenian Studies, all of the methodologies come out of the 1890s, which was when the last great Armenian scholars were studying in Europe and then came to Armenia, like Adjarian. And then they were killed or put in prison, and there was no new training. In the 1890s, the standard methodology was a historical one, where you would take a word and look at where it came from. You would just do that for all of the words you could come up with that were of historical interest. That was all they did-but now there are different things. Because of the Chomskyan revolution, we want to know how the system of the language works inside the head of an individual. So that leads you to ask different questions, and I try to collect information of that sort too.

JS: Is it being recorded, or is it just being done on paper?
BV: I had been doing audio recording, but I have decided that it needs to be video recording because there is a lot of information that isn't captured on
audio tape. Not just things like what the lips are doing and so on, but what the ambient environment is. Watching an old woman in her little house in a
village in Karabagh speaking in the dialect is much more effective than just hearing her voice. So from now on that is what I am going to be doing.

JS: You have already published one textbook on Armenian linguistics?
BV: I published a book with Oxford on Armenian phonology, which is the system of sounds. I tried to highlight the most interesting phenomena from
all of the different dialects, and put them together into a format that linguists could relate to, so they could then use Armenian data. Unfortunately, I had to make it sort of technical, which I regret. But I am working on an equivalent of that, which is just for Western Armenian, and looks at all the phenomena of pronunciation in the main varieties of Western Armenian, and does it in a way that most people will be able to understand.

JS: What has been the response to the book?
BV: Because I had to make it technical, it hasn't gotten much of a response from the Armenian community, and that's my own fault-though there were
extenuating political circumstances. It has done well in the linguistic community, and it has been reviewed in a lot of the major journals.

JS: How does the linguistics community view the Armenian language? For such a small group of people-less than 10 million in the world-is it considered
almost a lost language, like Assyrian?
BV: They don't know anything about it in the linguistic world, except for my book. As I mention in the book, it is a problem of the languages of the Middle East, each of which is of equal linguistic interest. There are thousands of articles and books written on Turkish linguistics and phonology, and it is the same for Arabic and Hebrew. But nothing on Armenian, even though if you look at the structures of their grammars they all have an equal number of interesting phenomena. Being a linguist, I like having more than one language around, but being a realist, I say you have to write in English if you want your work to be acknowledged. I'm all for writing a parallel version in Armenian or Russian, but you can't complain about people ignoring your work if you write it in Armenian.

JS: Have any Armenian linguists responded to your work, from places like the Brusov Language Institute in Yerevan? Does anyone at the American University of Armenia use your book, since it is published in English?
BV: My book is expensive, so I don't know if it is affordable to anyone in Armenia. I try to bring copies when I go, but I don't think many people have
it there. And American University doesn't have any linguists, or anyone who is even remotely close to what I do.

JS: So they are doing their own kind of linguistics work in Armenia?
BV: They are in the dialect institute. The manual I mentioned has about 750 questions in it, and they have collected all of those for 500 villages. And
they just released a dialect dictionary, which has a lot more dialect words than any previous dictionary. But in the familiar Soviet academic fashion,
they don't cite where they get the words from or what dialect they are from, so it is not actually useful as an academic tool. But they can't do much now
because they have no money.

JS: Do you focus more on Western Armenian?
BV: I do all varieties. People like to say there are two literary varieties of modern Armenian, but there are three. Persian Armenian is very different
than Eastern Armenian, and you can tell right away if someone is a Persian Armenian. Their grammar is very different, the vocabulary is very different,
the pronunciation is different. So I am also working on a book on Persian Armenian. This will be the first treatment of it-I don't know why no one has
ever written about it before.

JS: Do you also work on a journal?
BV: I run the Annual of Armenian Linguistics. It has been around for 22 years. Traditionally it was historical linguistics, the kind that Adjarian
did, but I am trying to get the younger linguists who work on Armenian and do modern linguistics to contribute. But it is going to take long time to
fully integrate it into the linguistic world of today.

JS: When you worked in Karabagh and Armenia, did you see any problems with people not understanding each other because of their different dialects, and any discrimination that results from a kind of hierarchical way of looking at others? Also, in a similar way, can you comment on the conflicts that arise here between people that speak Western Armenian, and the new immigrants that speak Eastern Armenian?
BV: The main problem is between people that use what I call real Armenian and those who use artificial Armenian-where they have tried to force the grammar of Arabic or French onto it, or they have tried to excise all of the Turkish, Persian, and Arabic words, or at least the ones they know are Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. It ends up sounding like a made up language, and those are never as good as ones that humans come up with naturally and unconsciously. For a linguist, it is much more interesting to work with a real dialect that has been evolving naturally in its village or city for thousands of years. The literary varieties are interesting because they are a combination of different dialects, but we are wary of them because they are artificial.

JS: Can you explain more of what you consider to be "real Armenian"?
BV: It is any variety that people haven't tinkered with. It could be the Van dialect, or the Gyumri dialect.

JS: So for a linguist, the more dialects the better? It makes it more interesting?
BV: Definitely, because each one is different. In the Armenian world, each one is very different from each other, more so than in the English world. In
the English world, a lot of the grammatical differences have disappeared over the last 100 years and we are left mainly with pronunciation and vocabulary differences. But in the Armenian world, the village dialects have major differences from each other, hence their inability to understand each other.

JS: I think many Armenians, especially in the ARF, are trying to find ways to help Armenians think of themselves spread across the world as part of the
same nation. One thing that brings us together is the ability to speak the same language and communicate with each other, without one thinking the
other is wrong or different. This would help them interact on an equal level in places like the Armenia-Diaspora Conference, where people are coming from all over the world, and they don't understand each other or they don't like the way the other is speaking because of these differences. In France, for example, the government tries to regulate the language...
BV: That's definitely a bad model. The French are terrible for linguistic purposes. Your goal is a good one of emphasizing the unity of the people, while recognizing the diversity within the community. It is not going to work if you try to force everyone to be the same-that's been seen many times. It's more useful to bear in mind examples like Sayat Nova, Khatchatour Abovian, and others who wrote in dialects, and whose work everyone respects and enjoys. These show that you can write well in any variety of your language, and it is more the skill of the author than what village they come from. Whenever you try to provide one standard for people, it always ends up being completely unnatural if you don't pick any existing form, or it ends up being one particular form which favors that city or town over all the others. When they pick Yerevan for Eastern, they are not really picking Yerevan, because people on the street in Yerevan don't speak standard Eastern
Armenian. I'm sure you have noticed that-they speak a Yerevan dialect, which is very different. So either you favor the people of Yerevan, which is not fair, or you end up with something unnatural. I think it is better to convey to the community that they are not inherently better or worse than another village or city just by virtue of being from that place. So, people from Istanbul are not inherently superior to people from Van. There would be a problem if they couldn't understand each other, but from my experience that wouldn't be the case unless you did something like go into a village where an old woman could only speak in her Karabagh dialect. But everyone in Karabagh now can speak Eastern Armenian.

Hagop Hachikian: And Russian.

BV: Right, and in the Western Armenian world, some can speak in a way you can't understand if they want, but they can also speak in a way that can be understood. But you can probably still tell they are from Aleppo or Istanbul, or wherever, but that just becomes a problem of bias, when you say something like "they are talking stupidly because they are from Istanbul." That's a problem of bias, not a problem of the language itself, and biases should be broken down rather than caving in to them.

JS: Do you find that languages are changing because of politics? Like in Azerbaijan, for example, they have changed the language several times. In Armenia, the Soviets made changes in the orthography. What do you say about those kinds of changes, which have been imposed from above?
BV: They are almost never successful. Language changes on its own, and you can't control it.

HH: There was spelling reform in Armenia, and in Azerbaijan. In Turkey, they did achieve changes in the vocabulary, where they eliminated Arabic and
Persian words, changed the non-Turkish place-names, and adopted a so-called Istanbul dialect as the proper spoken dialect in Turkey. It was enforced
more aggressively.

BV: Yes, you can make some changes, but that was not a good thing. That was a very draconian "Ataturkean" measure. The fact that this absolutist,
nationalist state wanted to do that sort of thing should tell us that we don't want to do that. Nationalism to save yourselves and encourage people to survive is different from this kind of pan-Turkist nationalism. I don't think anyone wants to go that far. The philosophy behind it is very nefarious: "everyone must be the
same" and "they must change to be like me because I'm the one making rules." It has built into it the idea that some people are better than others, which is just one step removed from the idea that "since I am better than them, they must change to be like me or be eliminated." Armenians, of all people, should know to stay away from that kind of thinking.

JS: Can you comment more on the gap between Eastern and Western Armenian? Do you think the changes made by the Soviets were logical or made sense linguistically, or was it something political to demonstrate control over the Armenians or to create a new division between people there and in the Diaspora? Do you think it will eventually be undone, or will one dialect shift to the other over time?
BV: Ultimately the differences will be resolved on their own, and you can't control them very much. Even in the Turkish case, where they did their best
to completely control what was going on, things still happened that were out of their control. With the East-West issue and the Soviet control of the language, the
spelling reform brings up a lot of issues that are analogous to the debate with English. If you reform the spelling, you stop discriminating against poorer people with less education. Our spelling system is so opaque that you have to have a lot of schooling to master it, so it discriminates against the poor, in effect. Similarly, in the Armenian world, the classical orthography was relatively opaque, although not as bad as English. Since the idea of the Soviet Union was that everyone should be equally educated, they wanted to make the spelling transparent. That's a noble goal, but then you eliminate the historical component of the language. If you keep
the old orthography, you make it easier to know what the language used to look like and read old writings in the language. But for the East-West issue, there is an asymmetry where all the Eastern Armenians know Western Armenian, at least passively, because of all the diasporans that went to Armenia, whereas the Western Armenians tend not to know Eastern. Although that may change soon-we don't yet know what the equilibrium reached in the post-Soviet period in the Diaspora will be from all of these Persian Armenians and Armenians from Armenia being in the US. The linguistic situation in California is very strange now-there are massive groups of Persian Armenians, Western Armenians, and Eastern Armenians, and it is not clear who will win out, if anyone.
    It's hard to say what the ultimate effect will be, but I definitely would not want to try to enforce legislation saying you all have to speak Eastern or Western Armenian. Just let the kids work it out-I would prefer a naturalistic solution. The top priority should be that you keep the language. But Eastern Armenian has a leg up because it has a country. Western Armenian doesn't, which makes me very worried about the future of Western Armenian in all its varieties. This is a topic of great concern-it looks like it is going to die out.

JS: Last June, we ran an opinion piece on the orthography change and the "unified spelling problem" by Haroutiun Khachatrian, where he outlined the
issue in an even-handed way, but concluded that the language of the Republic of Armenia is Eastern Armenian, so the Armenian government and the people in the country can't be expected to change to the dialect of the Diaspora.
BV: The whole idea of nationalism didn't catch on until the late 19th century. Before then you could have people like Sayat Nova, and even Mesrob Mashtots, who would just write in their own dialect, and people didn't say "Why are you writing your songs in the Tiflis dialect-you should be writing in Van dialect."

JS: There are a number of new immigrants who are speaking Eastern Armenian, but the Armenian schools here are teaching Western Armenian. Where do you see the future of the Armenian language in the US? Do you think both dialects will be lost eventually?
BV: It doesn't have to be lost, but it is extremely difficult to create a situation of stable diglossia, where a minority community is able to maintain its language in addition to the majority language. But there are many cases in the world where that does happen. A good example is in Karabagh, where it was under Russian control for a long time, and yet everyone there still speaks their village dialect. In the Russian republics, they all speak Russian from the 80 years under Soviet control, but everyone still learned the local languages.

JS: What is the typical life-span in the US for non-English languages?
BV: This is a very well studied issue. What you find is, no matter how much the local community tries to stop the attrition process by having things like Saturday schools, the people who first immigrate try to speak the ambient language-in this case English-to their kids because they think it's the more educated language and they want their kids to fit in-and they think their kids will be confused if they hear a different language at home. Those kids will either not learn their parents language, or if they do hear that language from their parents the first kid will learn it but the second and on will not. The first kid will learn the parent's language and they will learn English, and the younger kids will use the oldest kid as an intermediary between them and their parents-so they will speak English to the oldest kid, who will then translate for the parents. This is amply attested. Even with the kids who do learn the language from their parents or grandparents, at age 5 or 6 when they are sent off to school, within one day typically they come home and refuse to speak that language anymore because they see that no one else has it and it is
embarrassing for them. That's it for that language. Then the generation after that, their kids, often want to reclaim their heritage. But again because of misconceptions about how languages are learned, they either try to do it in college or after that, and that's too late and they can only learn a bit of it at best. The only way to really learn a language is to hear it spoken when you are young. Teaching doesn't work, and anything after a certain age doesn't work. So the typical trajectory is that the language is lost within two generations. There are always exceptional individuals who learn the language outside of these parameters, like Lara Setrakian, the president of the Armenian Club at Harvard.

JS: But Armenian is still being learned in homes and in schools across the US. Is there anything you can recommend for the future of the language here?
BV: I have an article on that, which you can read on my web site, about what the Armenian community can do. I advocate teaming kids with grandparents in particular, which is a strategy being used in California with the Native American languages. But the key is for parents and grandparents to get over this misconception that if they speak Armenian to the kids, that the kids will get confused and not learn English well. It's just not true, and Armenians of all people
should know that, because they have been multilingual throughout their entire history. If you say, Armenians in Istanbul know Turkish and Armenian, but they have
an Armenian accent in Turkish, it doesn't result from their hearing two languages and not learning one well. It results from the fact that other people speak it that way around you. Kids just learn what they hear being used around them. To take an English example, kids around here don't speak with a Boston accent because they are stupid or lazy. They speak that way because they are in Boston and that's what you hear.

JS: How do you sort out the Turkish words mixed in Western Armenian and the Russian words mixed in Eastern Armenian? Does that confuse you as a linguist if you aren't fluent in those languages as well?
BV: It is confusing for a person who only knows standard Armenian speaking with a villager because the villager won't know the neo-classical words that
the literary person is using, and the literary person won't necessarily know all of the Turkish words the villager is using. People need to bear in mind that you don't use Turkish words because you are ignorant or too lazy to think of the Armenian word. Typically it is because that is what people would normally use for that word around you, and you are just doing what everyone else does-unconsciously, and there's nothing wrong with that-or it has a different linguistic significance than the Armenian word.
    In English, if you say "je ne sais quoi" instead of "I don't know what," they mean the same thing literally, but in terms of the pragmatics or the implications of using one phrase over the other, they are very different. One is very pretentious and academic, or you might be using it in an ironic way as a joke.
    I discussed examples of this in a talk on the use of Turkish in modern Armenian. There are times where the Turkish allows you to make a word-play that you couldn't in Armenian, or vice versa. You may want to rhyme two words, but the rhyme won't work with the Armenian but it will with the Turkish, or vice versa.
The writer Yervant Odian referred to one Armenian official in the Ottoman Parliament as "the ox-cart of Turkish authority," and he used the Turkish phrase for a specific reason. It wasn't because he couldn't think of the Armenian expression, which was very basic. It implies that this official was more connected to the Turkish lines of authority than the Armenian community. In Turkish, the word for ox also stirs up the connotation of being an idiot, but in Armenian it wouldn't necessarily be activated. People need to bear in mind that when you use foreign words, it's not as simple as their being ignorant or lazy. There are reasons for everything we do, whether or not we are aware of them. People shouldn't be condemned for using Russian or Turkish or English.

JS: Can you describe some of your research on the Muslim Armenians, the Hemshin?
BV: Hagop introduced me to Temel, the main person who speaks it here. In the
northeast corner of Turkey, there is a large group of Armenians that
converted to Islam. In the eastern half of that, a lot of them still speak a
local dialect of Armenian.
Adjarian actually worked with the non-Muslim ones at the turn of the
century. Those mainly ended up in Abkhazia, which is just north of that
region. They are interesting for many reasons. They have been cut off for a
long time. By virtue of converting to Islam, their ties to Armenia were
severed. This meant no more Armenian educational system, no Armenian
alphabet. Their conversion preceded the nationalist movement, so they never
experienced the nefarious influence of nationalism and literacy, where their
local speech patterns were tinkered with by school teachers.
For someone interested in how things used to be, they are invaluable. And
then there is the confrontation between the Islamic culture and their
traditional Armenian culture. We worked a lot with Temel and his wife about
8 years ago, and we now have a small research group of people who are
interested in these people. We are having a conference about them in Holland
in the Fall.
Part of the plan is to organize a research expedition. I want to have a
linguist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a photographer, an art
historian, and a geographer go around to the villages and do what we can the
way people did in the 19th century. I want to do recording in every village,
because every one we know about is a bit different than each of the other
villages.
Hagop hears rumors about some of the more westerly ones still speaking
Armenian, so I want to check that out. But again, you need to bring the
right people. There is a guy in Holland who is German, but his wife is one
of the western Hemshinli, so she has a lot of Armenian in her Turkish but
doesn't speak Armenian.
JS: I know you ask this question, "what makes them Armenian?" There was a
forced conversion to Islam, but this comes down to the core of questions
around national identity.
HH: Even the Turkish nationalists among them acknowledge that they were
previously Christian. They say that before the coming of Islam, Christianity
was the proper religion, so it was acceptable to be Christian until the
coming of Islam when they would have to convert.
Because they lived with Armenians before, they acquired Armenian Christianity as well as some words, but the language they speak is pure
Turkish now, they have no Armenian blood, and there are different levels of
denial. Some people deny more, some people acknowledge Armenian
connections-they don't have a single story.
BV: When I spoke about them at the University of Michigan, the Turkish
professor, who is German, approached me and he was very angry. I had
presented linguistic evidence that they are Armenian-it is very clear to
anyone that is objective, but I wanted to give evidence anyway. He was very
offended, and he said "These are just Turks who said they are Armenian so
they would be treated better by the government." Of course, this makes no
sense at all, and this was from someone that was German, and not Turkish.
They started the conversion in the 16th-17th century and went on as late as
1915.
JS: How do the Armenian audiences react?
BV: I think normally they are titillated to hear that such a group exists.
Some people get angry or outraged, but that's true no matter what topic you
discuss. My take on it is, they are whatever they are, it is just
interesting to study how their culture and language work now, and if you are
interested in history to look at what you can reconstruct from the current
situation about how they used to be. I am not really interested in forcing
them to call themselves one thing or the other. Identity is an extremely
complicated thing, and you can't just decide one way or the other based on a
whim.
JS: And Hovann Simonian is working on a book on this topic?
BV: Yes, he is a student at USC working on a book on the Hemshinli, and
Hagop has written a nice chapter for it, which is in part about the
place-name reform in Turkey.
HH: I have a letter that goes back to 1916 from Enver, which says "it is the
proper time to speedily change those names which are in foreign
languages-Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek-and change them to Muslim names."
He is trying to hold on to the Muslim groups as kindred people, as a single
force against Christians and infidels, which they had just declared a jihad
against.
BV: This shows the power of language. The most powerful thing is the most
simple, which is the change from "Anatolia" to "Turkey." Now people outside
of Turkey think that's the land of the Turks because of the name. You'd
think people could see beyond the name, but that's not how it works.
Beyond that, they changed 30,000 place-names from 1916 to the mid-1960s. Now
they all look Turkish or Muslim, which means that no outsider will never
even think-unless someone tells them-that this is anything other than a
Turkish place. For my students who don't know anything about the Armenians,
they often take what they see on a map today or what they read in the paper
as being how things are.
So something like a name change is extremely effective, although my friends tell me that people in Turkey still remember the old names. So right now we
are in a pivotal time, where everything has been wiped out but people still
have memory of how it used to be. But once you make the switch to the next
stage, that's it.
JS: Hovann is also a coauthor of a great book on this topic, with Prof. R.
Hrair Dekmejian. Are these people going to be impacted by the pipeline that
is going to be built in northeastern Turkey? Will the purchase of the
property along the route disrupt these people?
HH: They live on a mountain range near the Black Sea, and the route will
pass south of that.
BV: This brings up something I will mention briefly. I spoke at NAASR about
ways in which you can convey important Armenians issues to students. With
the pipeline-which illustrates nefarious things about our government, the
Turkish government, and the oil companies-they actually have that as a main
plot points in one of the James Bond movies, where you can see the pipeline
going up over Armenia. That's something that non-Armenian students can
relate to. You can show them the map, or show them the part where they
depict the Azeris as being Christian. They depict an Orthodox priest in a
cave church in Azerbaijan, which makes it seem like they are Christian. I
personally don't care if people are Christian or Muslim, but that has a
subliminal effect on people watching.
JS: What about the Harvard Caspian Studies Program? We have written a lot
about the funding of the program from the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce
and the oil industry, academic integrity and corporate funding, and where
research sponsorship comes from. Even former Harvard President Derek Bok has
written a book this year, Universities in the Marketplace: The
Commercialization of Higher Education, in which he addresses these issues at
Harvard and other institutions. This relates to the Caspian Studies Program,
when they are called by the US government to testify on issues such as
Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act.
BV: It is a terrible and scary thing that we have this institution that is
just a cover for the oil interests and the Azeri government. But it's not
the only one like that at Harvard. Pretty much all of the Kennedy
School-type operations are like that. They are just vehicles for politicians
to do lobbying-they are not academic.
But what can you do about it? It would be hard to shut down the Caspian
Studies Program. However, since Harvard presents itself as a pure academic
institution, it is possible to get a leg in to the program. If we had people
who were reasonable and played their cards properly, they could easily be
put on the board and then start moving the agenda in a more reasonable
direction.
Caspian Studies is a fine topic, if it is done in the right way and isn't
just the President's son talking [Ilham Aliyev]. They asked Jirayr
Libaridian to be on the board and he tried it for a while and stopped, the Armenian Chair should be on it, and probably one or two other people from
within Harvard that have something to do with Armenian issues.
Once you have that in place, they can't be a puppet anymore for the Azeri
government and the oil companies. There is nothing they could do to stop the
Armenians from being involved in it. But because of mismanagement and flawed
personalities at Harvard, we have no representation on it.
JS: If those sorts of people, people like Libaridian who are described as
"reasonable" or "moderate," were in that position, do you really think they
will change much of what the program is doing? They invite Armenian speakers
such as Ronald Suny, who only repeats their views and interpretations of the
region.
BV: You have to get them on the governing board of the program, which
determines what events will be held and who comes to speak. If they are only
involved at the conferences, the effect will not be as great. They have to
be involved in the decision-making.
JS: That is a weakness of the Armenian community, because we have not
cultivated that level of person to serve in positions such as that. There
are very few that could actually get into a program like that and speak in
their terms on their level.
BV: I don't think that is a problem of the Armenian community. It is a
problem of the individuals in Armenology in this country. There are plenty
of Armenologists in Europe who would be perfect for it. They are very
politically savvy and active, but that just isn't the case here, especially
at Harvard.
JS: What is your impression of the Armenian Chair at Harvard, and is there
anything you think the community can do to make the Armenian Chair at
Harvard better?
BV: It's a tough challenge to improve things there because of the immunity
that a chairholder has. But the first step is to make the community aware of
what is being done and not being done by the chair. The next step is to take
a stand and stop "kowtowing." Many people just don't know what is going on
there, and the people that do know have not taken a stand.
Until recently that included me, for the same reasons as everyone else. It's
difficult to stand up to a bully-there are political consequences. Whenever
you say "the emperor has no clothes," there are people that will think you
are crazy. In the case of the Soviet Union, everyone knew it wasn't working,
but no one was willing to stand up and say it because they were afraid they
would be scapegoated, killed, ridiculed, or lose their job.
The next step is to stand up and say there is something wrong here, and we
need to do something about it. After that, then it becomes harder because
you can't just replace someone. You can put pressure on them to shape up,
and say "here is what we want out of the chair."
JS: Do you mean through the university? Does NAASR have anything to do with
the chair anymore, or do they just play a supporting role?
BV: They play a facilitating role politically, in the sense that they still
defer to the chair, but they don't have any power over the chair at this
point.
JS: I think the community looks at Harvard as something that is untouchable,
and the chair as something they want to protect. There is not much
self-criticism in the Armenian world, so not many want to go public with
something and hurt an Armenian position.
BV: It's reasonable to not want to hurt your own people or your own group.
But that's one of the reasons that action needs to be taken, because the
chair is actually hurting the community at this point. When you call the
Armenians neo-Nazis, that isn't helping the community and it's not leaving
it alone-it's hurting it. You are providing fodder for people that want to
attack the Armenians.
JS: Professor [James] Russell is an expert on ancient Armenian and Persian
history, but the period he often talks about is 1930s-1950s, mostly
Armenian-American community life. Why do you think he gets into these
current affairs?
BV: He's like most academics and many non-academics, who think they are an
expert on many things outside the area of their training. His training is
actually in Iranian Studies.
JS: Does he have many students? Do you have to have a certain number of
students to keep a chair?
BV: No. He typically has one new student each year. The Near Eastern
Department is actually very reasonable. In theory a department could say we
are only admitting the best 10 students, regardless of whether they want to
do Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, or whatever. Then they would probably mostly
end up as students that do Hebrew. Instead, they give every professor the
chance to have a student each year or every two years. They are making the
commitment to let every professor have students.
What it means is that every year or two years there is a new Armenian grad
student, but they have all dropped out or switched since James came in 1993.
But they'll keep coming because of the Harvard name. There will always be
people who want to do Armenian Studies at Harvard, regardless of who is in
the position. To their credit, they don't know; who would ever suspect these
things that have been going on. But then they find out, and then they leave.
JS: How does the application process work? Does the department recruit the
students for him, and drag them in?
BV: No. The students apply blindly to Harvard. Then the department says, for
example, this year it is the Akkadian professor's turn to get someone, or
the Iranian or the Armenian. Then James can pick one of the three applicants
that he likes the most in that year.
JS: The student doesn't choose what to study?
Hagop Hachikian: The student does apply, but there's no guarantee that he or
she is going to be chosen for that year.
BV: In our department, it works the other way. The chairman has total
control over who gets in, and they just pick who they want for themselves
each year, regardless of whether the other professors should be getting
people. So NELC [Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations] is actually very
kindly and wisely run, in my opinion. The opportunity to get one Armenian
student a year is squandered, but the students have no choice in it.
JS: So one person has graduated from the program in the past 10 years?
BV: Yes, Sergio LaPorta finished two years ago. He is in Jerusalem now. He
did his thesis on Grigor Tatevatsi, who was a 14th century theologian in
Tatev.
JS: I tried reading the text of Russell's recent public lecture series at
NAASR, which is posted on their web site. It is very cryptic and probably
difficult to understand what he is talking about for a general audience. I
imagine many in the audience show up and if they can't really follow what he
is talking about, they just assume he is brilliant. It seems that no one
wants to be critical of him, because of his position.
BV: They also give him the benefit of the doubt-I think humans are designed
to be this way. They assume that other humans are acting rationally. At the
Kars conference at UCLA about a year ago, he was talking about the main
Armenian church there and the carvings around it. Some of the Soviet
scholars there were very angry at what he said, which was partly justified
and partly not.
He had made up what he was saying about the significance of the images on
the church, and they didn't like the fact that he couldn't substantiate what
he was saying. But they were also annoyed that he was talking about
Christian imagery of a sort they didn't agree with. One of the got up and
said it was just "men," and not Gregory the Illuminator or whoever James was
saying it was.
So each side was not entirely justified in this case, but then James
launched into an incredible tirade against them in front of everyone, and
then another one in private in the hallway. It was the usual arguments for
him, that the Soviet Armenian scholars are all Nazis or were poorly trained.
JS: So what can the community do with Harvard or with the Armenian Chair?
BV: They can go to the Dean or the President. I am sure there are Armenians
that are well-placed enough that they can meet with the President. They can
let him know what's been going on with the chair, and what they think are
reasonable goals or activities for a chair-that have nothing to do with
academic freedom.
What you need to watch out for is the defense that academics need to be free
to do their own research and you can't censor them-but this isn't about
that. This is about basic goals like producing students, doing things for
the community, allowing people to take your classes, and so on.
JS: So you have seen him in other academic settings where he reveals a bad
temperament? I have read his criticism of the ARF in many places, but his attacks are not only directed toward us?
BV: It is just what happens to be a convenient attack against you. When
someone attacks him, he will pick on whatever variable is available for that
group. If it is the ARF or an equivalent Armenian organization, he could
call them neo-Nazi, or reactionary, or nationalist. But if it is a group
that doesn't have that attribute, then it will be anti-Semitic or
homophobic. But he can't call me a rabid Armenian nationalist.
JS: I think this really comes down to sponsorship. NAASR gives Russell a
forum to give lectures and classes, where he might not have classes at
Harvard, and it also gives him exposure in the community. And Manoog Young's
background/interest is in that period of history, in Avedis Derounian/John
Roy Carlson and the anti-communist reaction from the Armenian community. He
has Derounian's papers at NAASR, and that is the period Russell is taking an
interest in. Russell has even told me that his parents were members of the
communist party in the US, so this subject is very personal for him, and he
has that connection with Manoog because of those loyalties.
BV: In my opinion, this stuff about communism is not relevant today. It has
no place.
JS: You are right. This is not really relevant in the Armenian community
today. People within the community don't have these kinds of loyalties and
conflicts anymore, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union. People
like Russell are trying to keep these fights going, but I don't think he has
much of an audience for it. It is bothering people, but I don't think people
are really responding to it the way he would like. I am not sure why he is
getting into these political debates, and why he is "throwing stones." Do
you think the chair is supposed to get involved in the community and make
friends in the community? Is that how a chair advances itself?
BV: It would help. If the community endows the chair, I as the chairholder
would feel an obligation to serve the community. But you shouldn't have to
say things that are not true. In the case of the Genocide, if you look at it
in an academic way it's clear that it happened, and as a scholar it is your
obligation to make that known, whether it is your area or not.
The Armenian Chair at Harvard is what everyone looks to from around the
whole world for things involving Armenians and Armenia. That makes it the
most important position for representing Armenian interests-meaning, what
actually happened. So it's important for the chair to consider the
consequence of their actions, and to think about what they should be doing
and where they should be going with the program.
It's also important for the community to keep a close eye on what is
happening. And I do think that building the program should be a goal of the
department or the chair. And if you want to build it, you need to maintain
good relations with the university, your department, and the community.
Those are the people who can help you build the program. But I would never
advocate selling out or lying about things. JS: Why are you leaving Harvard?
BV: The short answer is that I didn't get tenure, and I have a full
professor offer at Wisconsin. The longer answer is that our department is
the last holdout of the American equivalent of the school that Adjarian came
out of.
In America it died out in the 1950s when Chomsky came on the scene. But
because of the way the Harvard tenure process works, you can maintain older
traditions in the face of changes in direction in academia, because you don'
t have to defend hirings and non-hirings. You can do whatever you want and
get away with it. At other schools where the tenure process is explicit, the
hirings directly reflect the currents in the academic world within a 10-20
year level of fineness, where at Harvard it is more like 100-150 years.
This field of 19th century linguistics died out by 1955 in the US, but we
had someone come to our department in 1950 in this area, and he's still
here. He's the guy who's just leaving, and he's built up a set of his
students around him who protected our department from the currents of change
in our field. That's the person who kept me from even getting reviewed for
tenure, which is illegal according to the Handbook For Tenure Review at
Harvard.
For your tenure review, it has to happen in a specific year. During that
year, you hand in all of your publications and your teaching records
(handouts, ratings). The department faculty looks them over and makes a
decision of whether or not to put you forward for review.
In my case, they made their decision without telling me and without having
my materials for review and without knowing the details of my record. I went
to the administration and told them that they made the decision without
looking at my record. I filed a protest in the middle of December, and I
still haven't heard anything. I just have to leave, and there is no recourse
against Harvard.
JS: So you got an offer elsewhere, in another linguistics department? Are
you happy to be starting there, or do you have any regrets?
BV: I like Wisconsin-their faculty is actually better than at Harvard. But I
am upset for reasons parallel to the Armenian case, which is that we have
more potential here than anywhere. With no effort at all, Harvard could
easily be in the top five in our field, and they could be number one in
Armenian if they wanted.
JS: Are you glad to just be getting out of here, and to be able to start
somewhere else, where you can be more productive?
BV: I'm glad about two things. First, running the department here was
killing me, physically, with 16-18 hour days as the only one who took care
of any students. I had several hundred students. The other things is, having
my plans and proposals shot down or negated by my chairman and by James
constantly over the last nine years was extremely frustrating.
When I would try to do something in linguistics-like create a mind, brain, and behavior track, which was an interdepartmental program we have-I wanted
our department to participate. When I tried to do something Armenian, James
would undo it or counteract it. So those are two things I will be glad to be
rid of.
Having really good students, and the network of dialect speakers and
Armenian friends will be missed. It is a waste.
JS: What kinds of programs are you going to do next?
BV: I don't know yet. I know there is a Tomarza community that I want to
meet, but it's hard to predict how people will react.
JS: You will definitely meet Armenians. I am sure Zohrab Kaligian from the
ANC of Wisconsin will introduce you to the various parts of the community
and he also works jointly with the universities on programs. I know you have
already studied the Mid-West, with your work on the "pop versus soda"
controversy.
BV: I will continue that work. But here they have students from all over the
world, at Wisconsin they will probably be more local. But for a professor it
is important to adjust to the way things work at that school so you can best
serve the students, so I'll wait and see what they need and what they are
interested in.
Armenian Studies is an incredibly diverse and wide-ranging area-it could be
anthropology, history, linguistics. So a chair has to be equipped to handle
and educate students in any of those areas. But the way it works out, they
are all forced into one particular area, which almost none of them are
interested in. I happen to think it is an interesting area, but I would
never force everyone to go into it.
JS: Do you think there is enough interest in Armenian Studies to sustain
growth?

BV: Yes, if there are the right people. It has been growing in areas where
there are good chairholders.

JS: Why aren't there more PhD's in Armenian Studies?

BV: The pool that comes in is small, but the pool that comes out is much,
much smaller. At Harvard we get one per year, but none come out.

JS: And where are they going to go? There is a lot of competition for a
limited number of positions.

BV: You need to train to be able to get a job not in an Armenian Chair, like
I have. Everyone should have that training anyway, even if there wasn't a
job crunch. You need to be marketable to the academic community at large.
Once you get a critical mass of people placed, you can start changing
attitudes in the field to the point where a department would be more willing
to hire someone that works in Armenian.

JS: Where would the academic community draw in Armenian Studies? How can it become more integrated?

BV: It has to be done by individuals. Armenian Studies fits into a lot of
different areas, but you need to have a good individual that can persuade a
department that they want to hire that person. Christina Maranci is a prime example. She got two job offers of a non-Armenian sort in one year
because she presents her work in a respectable way. It can be done. People
think Armenian Studies is inferior, but it isn't. It is just that because of
various political or historical reasons, the people doing it now are not
very marketable to the academic community.

JS: Suny talks about this, criticizing much of the work that has been done in Armenian Studies as nationalist propaganda, that the work needs to have a
wider appeal with ideas and themes that everyone is using.

BV: I have problems with a lot of his work, but he did get a job that is non-Armenian, as a professor of political science at the
University of Chicago, which is an important position in the academic world. It also gives him license to be consulted as an
expert in non-Armenian circles, for example on the Soviet Union or the Caucasus.

JS: Prof. Vaux, I would like to thank you for your comments.

BV: Thank you.

Jason Sohigian: What is the typical life span in the US for languages other than English?

Bert Vaux: This is a very-well-studied issue. What you find is,
no matter how much the local community tries to stop the
attrition process by having things like Saturday schools, the
people who first immigrate try to speak the ambient language--in
this case English--to their kids because they think it's the more
educated language and they want their kids to fit in, and they
think their kids will be confused if they hear a different
language at home.

Those kids will either not learn their parents' language or, if
they do hear that language from their parents, the first kid will
learn it but the second and on will not. The first kid will learn
the parents' language and English, and the younger kids will use
the oldest kid as an intermediary between themselves and their
parents--so they will speak English to the oldest kid, who will
then translate for the parents.

Even with the kids who do learn the language from their parents
or grandparents, at age five or six, when they are sent off to
school, within one day typically they come home and refuse to
speak that language anymore because they see that no one else has
it and it is embarrassing for them. That's it for that language.

Then the generation after that, their kids, often want to reclaim
their heritage. But again because of misconceptions about how
languages are learned they either try to do it in college or
after that, and that's too late and they can only learn a bit of
it at best.

The only way to really learn a language is to hear it spoken when
you are young. Teaching doesn't work, and anything after a
certain age doesn't work. So the typical trajectory is that the
language is lost within two generations. But there are always
exceptional individuals who learn the language outside of these
parameters, such as Lara Setrakian, the president of the Harvard
Armenian Club.

JS: But Armenian is still being learned in homes and in schools
across the US. Is there anything you can recommend for the future
of the language here?

BV: I have an article on that, which you can read on my Web site,
about what the Armenian community can do [see "The fate of the
Armenian language in the United States" at
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~vaux/fate.pdf]. I advocate
teaming kids with grandparents, which is a strategy being used in
California with the Native American languages.

But the key is for parents and grandparents to get over the
misconception that if they speak Armenian to the kids, the kids
will get confused and not learn English well. It's just not true,
and Armenians of all people should know that, because they have
always been multilingual.

If you say, Armenians in Istanbul know Turkish and Armenian, but
they have an Armenian accent in Turkish, it doesn't result from
their hearing two languages and not learning one well. It results
from the fact that other people speak it that way around them.
Kids just learn what they hear being used around them. To take an
English example, kids around here don't speak with a Boston
accent because they are stupid or lazy. They speak that way
because they are in Boston and that's what they hear.

JS: How do you sort out the Turkish words mixed in Western
Armenian and the Russian words mixed in Eastern Armenian? Does
that confuse you as a linguist if you aren't fluent in those
languages as well?

BV: It is confusing for a person who knows only standard Armenian
speaking with a villager, because the villager won't know the
neoclassical words that the literary person is using, and the
literary person won't necessarily know all of the Turkish words
the villager is using.

People need to bear in mind that you don't use Turkish words
because you are ignorant or too lazy to think of the Armenian
word. Typically it is because that is what people would normally
use for that word around you, and you are just doing what
everyone else does, unconsciously (and there's nothing wrong with
that)--or it has a different linguistic significance than the
Armenian word.

In English, if you say "je ne sais quoi" instead of "I don't know
what," they mean the same thing literally, but in terms of the
pragmatics or the implications of using one phrase over the
other, they are very different. One is very pretentious and
academic, or you might be using it in an ironic way as a joke.

I discussed examples of this in a lecture on the use of Turkish
in modern Armenian. There are times where the Turkish allows you
to make a wordplay that you couldn't in Armenian, or vice versa.
You may want to rhyme two words, but the rhyme won't work with
the Armenian but it will with the Turkish, or vice versa.

The writer Yervant Odian referred to one Armenian official in the
Ottoman Parliament as "the ox-cart of Turkish authority," and he
used the Turkish phrase for a specific reason. It wasn't because
he couldn't think of the Armenian expression. He implies that
this official was more connected to the Turkish lines of
authority than the Armenian community. In Turkish, the word for
ox also stirs up the connotation of being an idiot, but in
Armenian it wouldn't necessarily be activated.

People need to bear in mind that when you use foreign words, it's
not as simple as their being ignorant or lazy. There are reasons
for everything we do, whether or not we are aware of them. People
shouldn't be condemned for using Russian or Turkish or English.

JS: Can you describe some of your research on the Muslim
Armenians, the Hemshin?

BV: Hagop introduced me to Temel, the main person who speaks it
here. In the northeast corner of Turkey, there is a large group
of Armenians who converted to Islam. In the eastern half of that
area, a lot of them still speak a local dialect of Armenian.
Adjarian actually worked with the non-Muslim ones at the turn of
the century. Those mainly ended up in Abkhazia, which is just
north of that region.

The Hemshinli are interesting for many reasons. They have been
cut off for a long time. By virtue of converting to Islam, their
ties to Armenia were severed. This meant no more Armenian
educational system, no Armenian alphabet. Their conversion
preceded the nationalist movement, so they never experienced the
nefarious influence of nationalism and literacy, so their local
speech patterns were not tinkered with by schoolteachers.

For someone interested in how things used to be, they are
invaluable. And then there is the confrontation between the
Islamic culture and their traditional Armenian culture. We worked
a lot with Temel and his wife about eight years ago, and we now
have a small research group of people who are interested in these
people. We are having a conference about them in Holland in the
fall.

Part of the plan is to organize a research expedition. I want to
have a linguist, an anthropologist, a sociologist, a
photographer, an art historian, and a geographer go around to the
villages and do what we can the way people did in the 19th
century. I want to do recording in every village, because every
one we know about is a bit different from each of the other
villages.

Hagop hears rumors about some of the more westerly ones still
speaking Armenian, so I want to check that out. But again, you
need to bring the right people. There is a professor in Holland
who is German, but his wife is one of the western Hemshinli, so
she has a lot of Armenian in her Turkish but doesn't speak
Armenian.

JS: I know you ask this question, "What makes them Armenian?"
There was a forced conversion to Islam, but this comes down to
the core of questions around national identity.

Hagop Hachikian: Even the Turkish nationalists among them
acknowledge that they were previously Christian. They say that
before the coming of Islam, Christianity was the proper religion,
so it was acceptable to be Christian until the coming of Islam
when they would have to convert. They say that because they lived
with Armenians before, they acquired Armenian Christianity as
well as some words but the language they speak is pure Turkish
now and they have no Armenian blood.

And there are different levels of denial. Some people deny more,
some people acknowledge Armenian connections--they don't have a
single story.

BV: When I spoke about them at the University of Michigan, the
Turkish professor, who is German, approached me and he was very
angry. I had presented linguistic evidence that they are
Armenian--it is very clear to anyone that is objective, but I
wanted to give evidence anyway. He was very offended, and he
said, "These are just Turks who said they are Armenian so they
would be treated better by the government." Of course, this makes
no sense at all, and this was from someone who was German, not
Turkish. They started the conversion in the 16th-17th century and
went on as late as 1915.

JS: How do Armenian audiences react?

BV: I think normally they are titillated to hear that such a
group exists. Some people get angry or outraged, but that's true
no matter what topic you discuss. My take on it is, They are
whatever they are, it is just interesting to study how their
culture and language work now, and if you are interested in
history to look at what you can reconstruct from the current
situation about how they used to be. I am not really interested
in forcing them to call themselves one thing or the other.
Identity is an extremely complicated thing, and you can't just
decide one way or the other based on a whim.

JS: And Hovann Simonian is working on a book on this topic?

BV: Yes, he is a student at USC working on a book on the
Hemshinli, and Hagop has written a nice chapter for it, which is
in part about the place-name reform in Turkey.

HH: There is a directive from Enver Pasha that goes back to 1916,
which says "it is the proper time to speedily change those names
which are in foreign languages--Armenian, Bulgarian, and Greek--
and change them to Muslim names." He does not say Turkish. He is
trying to hold on to the Muslim groups as kindred people, as a
single force against Christians and infidels, whom they had just
declared a jihad against.

BV: This shows the power of language. The most powerful thing is
the most simple, which is the change from "Anatolia" to "Turkey."
Now people outside of Turkey think that's the land of the Turks
because of the name. You'd think people could see beyond the
name, but that's not how it works.

Beyond that, they changed 30,000 place-names from 1916 to the
mid-1960s. Now they all look Turkish or Muslim, which means that
no outsider will ever even think--unless someone tells them--that
this is anything other than a Turkish place. For my students who
don't know anything about the Armenians, they often take what
they see on a map today or what they read in the paper as being
how things are.

So something like a name change is extremely effective, although
my friends tell me that people in Turkey still remember the old
names. So right now we are in a pivotal time, where everything
has been wiped out but people still have memory of how it used to
be. But once you make the switch to the next stage, that's it.

JS: Are the Hemshin going to be impacted by the pipeline that is
going to be built in northeastern Turkey? I know Hovann is a
coauthor of a great book on this topic, with Prof. R. Hrair
Dekmejian. Will the purchase of the property along the route
disrupt these people?

HH: They live on a mountain range near the Black Sea, and the
route will pass south of that.

BV: This brings up something I will mention briefly. I spoke at
NAASR about ways in which you can convey important Armenians
issues to students. With the pipeline--which illustrates
nefarious things about our government, the Turkish government,
and the oil companies--they actually have that as a main plot
point in one of the James Bond movies, where you can see the
pipeline going up over Armenia. That's something that non-
Armenian students can relate to. You can show them the map, or
show them the part where they depict the Azeris as being
Christian. They depict an Orthodox priest in a cave church in
Azerbaijan, which makes it seem like they are Christian. I
personally don't care if people are Christian or Muslim, but that
has a subliminal effect on people watching.

JS: What about the Harvard Caspian Studies Program? We have
written about the funding of the program from the US-Azerbaijan
Chamber of Commerce and the oil industry, about academic
integrity and corporate funding, and where research sponsorship
comes from. Even former Harvard President Derek Bok has written a
book this year, Universities in the Marketplace: The
Commercialization of Higher Education, in which he addresses
these issues at Harvard and other institutions. This relates to
the Caspian Studies Program, when they are called by the US
government to testify on issues such as Section 907 of the
Freedom Support Act.

BV: It is a terrible and scary thing that we have this
institution that is just a cover for oil interests and the Azeri
government. But it's not the only one like that at Harvard.
Pretty much all of the Kennedy School-type operations are like
that. They are just vehicles for politicians to do lobbying--they
are not academic.

But what can you do about it? It would be hard to shut down the
Caspian Studies Program. However, since Harvard presents itself
as a pure academic institution, it is possible to get a leg in to
the program. If we had people who were reasonable and played
their cards properly, they could easily be put on the board and
then start moving the agenda in a more reasonable direction.

Caspian Studies is a fine topic, if it is done in the right way
and isn't just the Azeri President's son talking [Ilham Aliyev].
They asked Jirayr Libaridian to be on the board and he tried it
for a while and stopped. The Armenian Chair should be on it, and
probably one or two other people from within Harvard that have
something to do with Armenian issues.

Once you have that in place, they can't be a puppet anymore for
the Azeri government and the oil companies. There is nothing they
could do to stop the Armenians from being involved in it. But
because of mismanagement and flawed personalities at Harvard,
Armenians have no representation on it.

JS: If those sorts of people, people like Libaridian who are
described as "reasonable" or "moderate," were in that position,
do you really think they will change much of what the program is
doing? They invite Armenian speakers such as Ronald Suny, who
only repeats their views and interpretations of the region.

BV: You have to get them [i.e. individuals who can represent the
interests of the community well] on the governing board of the
program, which determines what events will be held and who comes
to speak. If they are only involved at the conferences, the
effect will not be as great. They have to be involved in the
decision-making.

JS: That is a weakness of the Armenian community, because we have
not cultivated that level of person to serve in positions such as
that. There are very few that could actually get into a program
like that and speak in their terms on their level.

BV: I don't think that is a problem of the Armenian community. It
is a problem of the individuals in Armenology in this country.
There are plenty of Armenologists in Europe who would be perfect
for it. They are very politically savvy and active, but that just
isn't the case here, especially at Harvard.

JS: What is your impression of the Armenian Chair at Harvard, and
is there anything you think the community can do to make the
Armenian Chair at Harvard better?

BV: It's a tough challenge to improve things there because of the
immunity that a chairholder has. But the first step is to make
the community aware of what is being done and not being done by
the chair. The next step is to take a stand and stop "kowtowing."
Many people just don't know what is going on there, and the
people that do know have not taken a stand.

Until recently that included me, for the same reasons as everyone
else. It's difficult to stand up to a bully--there are political
consequences. Whenever you say "the emperor has no clothes,"
there are people that will think you are crazy. In the case of
the Soviet Union, everyone knew it wasn't working, but no one was
willing to stand up and say it because they were afraid they
would be scapegoated, killed, ridiculed, or lose their job. The
next step is to stand up and say there is something wrong here,
and we need to do something about it.

After that, then it becomes harder because you can't just replace
someone. You can put pressure on them to shape up, and say, "Here
is what we want out of the chair."

JS: Do you mean through the university? Does NAASR have anything
to do with the chair anymore, or do they just play a supporting
role?

BV: They play a facilitating role politically, in the sense that
they still defer to the chair, but they don't have any power over
the chair at this point.

JS: I think the community looks at Harvard as something that is
untouchable, and the chair as something they want to protect.
There is not much self-criticism in the Armenian world, so not
many want to go public with something and hurt an Armenian
position.

BV: It's reasonable to not want to hurt your own people or your
own group. But that's one of the reasons that action needs to be
taken, because the chair is actually hurting the community at
this point. When you call the Armenians neo-Nazis, that isn't
helping the community and it's not leaving it alone--it's hurting
it. You are providing fodder for people that want to attack the
Armenians.

JS: Professor [James] Russell is an expert on ancient Armenian
and Persian history, but the period he often talks about is
1930s-1950s, mostly Armenian-American community life. Why do you
think he gets into these current affairs?

BV: He's like most academics, and many non-academics, who think
they are an expert on many things outside the area of their
training. His training is actually in Iranian Studies.

JS: Does he have many students? Do you have to have a certain
number of students to keep a chair?

BV: No. He typically has one new student each year. The Near
Eastern Department is actually very reasonable. In theory a
department could say we are only admitting the best 10 students,
regardless of whether they want to do Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian,
or whatever. Then they would probably mostly end up as students
that do Hebrew. Instead, they give every professor the chance to
have a student each year or every two years. They are making the
commitment to let every professor have students.

What it means is that every year or two years there is a new
Armenian grad student, but they have all dropped out or switched
since James came in 1993. But they'll keep coming because of the
Harvard name. There will always be people who want to do Armenian
Studies at Harvard, regardless of who is in the position. To
their credit, they don't know. Who would ever suspect these
things that have been going on? But then they find out, and then
they leave.

JS: How does the application process work? Does the department
recruit the students for him, and drag them in?

BV: No. The students apply blindly to Harvard. Then the
department says, for example, this year it is the Akkadian
professor's turn to get someone, or the Iranian or the Armenian.
Then James can pick one of the three applicants that he likes the
most in that year.

JS: The student doesn't choose what to study?

HH: The student does apply, but there's no guarantee that he or
she is going to be chosen for that year.

BV: In our department [linguistics], it works the other way. The
chairman has total control over who gets in, and they just pick
who they want for themselves each year, regardless of whether the
other professors should be getting people. So NELC [Near Eastern
Languages and Civilizations] is actually very kindly and wisely
run, in my opinion. The opportunity to get one Armenian student a
year is squandered, but the students have no choice in it.

JS: So one person has graduated from the program in the past 10
years?

BV: Yes, Sergio LaPorta finished two years ago. He is in
Jerusalem now. He did his thesis on Grigor Tatevatsi, who was a
14th century theologian in Tatev.

JS: I read the text of Russell's recent public lecture series at
NAASR, which is posted on their Web site. It is very cryptic and
probably difficult to understand for a general audience. I
imagine many in the audience show up, and if they can't really
follow what he is talking about they just assume he is brilliant.
It seems that no one wants to be critical of him, because of his
position.

BV: They also give him the benefit of the doubt--I think humans
are designed to be this way. They assume that other humans are
acting rationally.

At the Kars conference at UCLA about a year ago, he was talking
about the main Armenian church there and the carvings around it.
Some of the Soviet-trained scholars there were very angry at what
he said, which was partly justified and partly not. He had made
up what he was saying about the significance of the images on the
church, and they didn't like the fact that he couldn't
substantiate what he was saying. But they were also annoyed that
he was talking about Christian imagery of a sort they didn't
agree with. One of them got up and said it was just "men," and
not Gregory the Illuminator or whoever James was saying it was.
So each side was not entirely justified in this case, but then
James launched into an incredible tirade against them in front of
everyone, and then another one in private in the hallway.

It was the usual arguments for him, that the Soviet Armenian
scholars are all Nazis or were poorly trained.

JS: So what can the community do with Harvard or with the
Armenian Chair?

BV: I am sure there are Armenians who can meet with the President
of Harvard to let him know what's been going on with the chair
and what they think are reasonable goals or activities for a
chair--things that have nothing to do with academic freedom.

What you need to watch out for is the defense that academics need
to be free to do their own research and you can't censor them--
but this isn't about that. This is about basic goals like
producing students, doing things for the community, allowing
people to take your classes, and so on.

JS: So you have seen him in other academic settings where he
reveals a bad temperament? I have read his criticism of the ARF
in many places, but his attacks are not only directed toward us?

BV: It is just what happens to be a convenient attack against
you. When someone attacks him, he will pick on whatever variable
is available for that group. If it is the ARF or an equivalent
Armenian organization, he could call them neo-Nazi, or
reactionary, or nationalist. But if it is a group that doesn't
have that attribute, then it will be anti-Semitic or homophobic.
But he can't call me a rabid Armenian nationalist.

JS: I think this really comes down to sponsorship. NAASR gives
Russell a forum to give lectures, where he might not have many
classes at Harvard, and it also gives him exposure in the
community. And the person that has run NAASR for so many years--
Manoog Young--his background/interest is in that period of
history, in Avedis Derounian/John Roy Carlson and the anti-
communist reaction from the Armenian community. He has
Derounian's papers at NAASR, and that is the period Russell is
taking an interest in. Russell has told me that his parents were
somehow affiliated with the Communist Party in the US, so this
subject is very personal for him, and he has that connection with
Manoog because of those loyalties.

BV: In my opinion, this stuff about communism is not relevant
today. It has no place.

JS: You are right. This is not relevant in the Armenian community
today. People within the community don't have these kinds of
loyalties and conflicts anymore, especially since the fall of the
Soviet Union. People like Russell are trying to keep these fights
going, but I don't think he has much of an audience for it. It is
bothering people, but I don't think people are really responding
to it the way he would like. I am not sure why he is getting into
these political debates, and why he is "throwing stones." Do you
think the chair is supposed to get involved in the community and
make friends in the community? Is that how a chair advances
itself?

BV: It would help. If the community endows the chair, I as the
chairholder would feel an obligation to serve the community. But
you shouldn't have to say things that are not true. In the case
of the Genocide, if you look at it in an academic way it's clear
that it happened, and as a scholar it is your obligation to make
that known, whether it is your area or not.

The Armenian Chair at Harvard is what everyone looks to from
around the world for things involving Armenians and Armenia. That
makes it the most important position for representing Armenian
interests--meaning, what actually happened. So it's important for
the chair to consider the consequence of their actions and to
think about what they should be doing and where they should be
going with the program.

It's also important for the community to keep a close eye on what
is happening. And I do think that building the program should be
a goal of the department or the chair. And if you want to build
it, you need to maintain good relations with the university, your
department, and the community. Those are the people who can help
you build the program. But I would never advocate selling out or
lying about things.

JS: Why are you leaving Harvard?

BV: The short answer is that I didn't get tenure, and I have a
full-professor offer at Wisconsin. The longer answer is that our
department is the last holdout of the American equivalent of the
school that Adjarian came out of. In America it died out in the
1950s, when Chomsky came on the scene.

But because of the way the Harvard tenure process works, you can
maintain older traditions in the face of changes in direction in
academia, because you don't have to defend hirings and non-
hirings. You can do whatever you want and get away with it. At
other schools, where the tenure process is explicit, the hirings
directly reflect the currents in the academic world within a 10-
20 year level of fineness, where at Harvard it is more like 100-
150 years.

This field of 19th century linguistics died out by 1955 in the
US, but we had someone come to our department in 1950 in this
area, and he's still here. He's the guy who's just leaving, and
he's built up a set of his students around him who protected our
department from the currents of change in our field. That's the
person who kept me from even getting reviewed for tenure, which
is illegal according to the Handbook For Tenure Review at
Harvard.

For your tenure review, it has to happen in a specific year.
During that year, you hand in all of your publications and your
teaching records (handouts, ratings). The department faculty
looks them over and makes a decision of whether or not to put you
forward for review.

In my case, they made their decision without telling me and
without having my materials for review and without knowing the
details of my record. I went to the administration and told them
that they made the decision without looking at my record. I filed
a protest in the middle of December, and I still haven't heard
anything. I just have to leave, and there is no recourse against
Harvard.

JS: So you got an offer elsewhere, in another linguistics
department? Are you happy to be starting there, or do you have
any regrets?

BV: I like Wisconsin--their linguistics faculty is actually
better than at Harvard. But I am upset for reasons parallel to
the Armenian case, which is that we have more potential here than
anywhere. With no effort at all, Harvard could easily be in the
top five in our field, and they could be number one in Armenian
if they wanted.

JS: Are you glad to just be getting out of here, and to be able
to start somewhere else, where you can be more productive?

BV: I'm glad about two things. First, running the department here
was taking its toll on me, with 16-18 hour days taking care of
several hundred students. The other thing is that having my plans
and proposals shot down or negated by my chairman and by James
constantly over the last nine years was extremely frustrating.

When I would try to do something in linguistics--like create a
mind, brain, and behavior track, which was an interdepartmental
program we have--I wanted our department to participate. When I
tried to do something Armenian, James would undo it or counteract
it. So those are two things I will be glad to be rid of.

Having really good students, and the network of dialect speakers
and Armenian friends will be missed.

JS: What kinds of programs are you going to do next?

BV: I don't know yet. I know there is a Tomarza community that I
want to meet, but it's hard to predict how people will react.

JS: You will definitely meet Armenians. I am sure Zohrab Kaligian
from the ANC of Wisconsin will introduce you to the various parts
of the community and he also works jointly with the universities
on programs. I know you have already studied the Midwest, with
your work on the "pop versus soda" controversy.

BV: I will continue that work. But here they have students from
all over the world; at Wisconsin they will probably be more
local. But for a professor it is important to adjust to the way
things work at that school so you can best serve the students, so
I'll wait and see what they need and what they are interested in.

Armenian Studies is an incredibly diverse and wide-ranging area--
it could be anthropology, history, linguistics. So a chair has to
be equipped to handle and educate students in any of those areas.
But the way it works out, they are all forced into one particular
area, which almost none of them are interested in. I happen to
think it is an interesting area, but I would never force everyone
to go into it.

JS: Do you think there is enough interest in Armenian Studies to
sustain growth?

BV: Yes, if there are the right people. It has been growing in
areas where there are good chairholders.

JS: Why aren't there more PhD's in Armenian Studies?

BV: The pool that comes in is small, but the pool that comes out
is much, much smaller. At Harvard we get one per year, but none
come out.

JS: And where are they going to go? There is a lot of competition
for a limited number of positions.

BV: You need to train to be able to get a job not in an Armenian
Chair, like I have. Everyone should have that training anyway,
even if there wasn't a job crunch. You need to be marketable to
the academic community at large. Once you get a critical mass of
people placed, you can start changing attitudes in the field to
the point where a department would be more willing to hire
someone that works in Armenian.

JS: Where would the academic community draw in Armenian Studies?
How can it become more integrated?

BV: It has to be done by individuals. Armenian Studies fits into
a lot of different areas, but you need to have a good individual
that can persuade a department that they want to hire that
person. Christina Maranci is a prime example. She got two job
offers of a non-Armenian sort in one year because she presents
her work in a respectable way. It can be done. People think
Armenian Studies is inferior, but it isn't. It is just that
because of various political or historical reasons, the people
doing it now are not very marketable to the academic community.

JS: Suny talks about this, criticizing much of the work that has
been done in Armenian Studies as nationalist propaganda, that the
work needs to have a wider appeal with ideas and themes that
everyone is using.