Speakers
Western Armenian is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenian diaspora, mainly in North America and South America, Europe and most of the Middle East except for Iran. It is spoken by only a small percentage of Armenians in Turkey as a first language, with 18 percent among the community in general and 8 percent among younger people. Western Armenian was at one the point the dominant Armenian dialect, after the genocide. Western Armenia was wiped clean of Western Armenians. Those who fled to Eastern Armenia, today speak Eastern Armenian.
On February 21, 2009 International Mother Language Day has been marked with the publication of a new edition of the "Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger" by UNESCO where the Western Armenian language in Turkey is defined as a definitely endangered language.
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Famous quotes containing the word speakers:
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
—Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948)