“Every word is a world”: loanword ideologies and linguistic purism in post-Soviet Armenia

Through the analysis of materials such as online articles, blogs, and radio broadcasts, this paper investigates linguistic purism toward Russian and English loanwords in the understudied context of post-Soviet Armenia. Our analysis finds that public commentators categorize potential loanwords as “borrowings” (փոխառություն [pʰokhaṛutʰyun]) if acceptable and “foreignisms” (օտարաբանություն [ōtarabanutʰyun]) if unacceptable, while also comparing these loanwords with acceptable and unacceptable Armenian equivalent words. In categorizing both loanwords and Armenian equivalents, commentators base their arguments on evaluative contrasts related to threats to the language, the desirability of word meaning and usage, and stylistic appropriateness. Though commentators situate themselves into opposing purist and moderate camps, differentiated by their tolerance of loanwords and classifications of individual words, the two camps rely on the same ideological framework of contrasts and use similar argumentation. Thus, while the debate invokes binary criteria for evaluating words, similar to those identified in other instances of linguistic purism, Armenian commentators themselves often defy binary categorization, falling along a fluid language-ideological continuum in which seemingly opposing commentators sometimes demonstrate striking similarities. Framed alongside prior studies of language ideologies in post-Soviet spaces, this evidence suggests that the loanword debate has a more symbolic than practical function in Armenia’s contemporary multilingual society.