Karin dialect

The spread of the Karin dialect
  today[1]            before 1915–1920[2]
not all areas where the Karin dialect was/is spoken had/have Armenian majority

The Karin dialect (Armenian: Կարնոյ բարբառ, Karno barbař) is a Western Armenian dialect originally spoken in and around the city of Erzurum (called Karin by Armenians), now located in eastern Turkey.

Before World War I, the Karin dialect was spoken by the local Armenian populations in much of the Erzurum Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire and Kars Oblast of the Russian Empire. After the Armenian genocide of 1915, most of Erzurum's Armenian population took refuge to the Russian-controlled parts of Armenia. The city of Kars and its Russian oblast became part of the First Republic of Armenia in 1918, but was occupied by Kemalist Turkey as a result of the Turkish–Armenian War in fall 1920.

Today, it is one of the most widely spoken Western Armenian dialects, most of which became virtually extinct after the genocide.[3] Nowadays, it is spoken in the northwest of Armenia (in and around the city of Gyumri) and by the Armenian minority in Georgia's Samtskhe-Javakheti province.[4]

  1. ^ Mesropyan, Haykanush. "Հայրենակցական միութիւնները և հայերէնի բարբառները (Patriotic associations and Armenian dialects)" (in Armenian). Armenian State Institute of Linguistics. Retrieved 22 March 2013.
  2. ^ Adjarian 1909: the map from Adjarian's book Classification des dialectes arméniens can be seen here
  3. ^ Keith Brown, Sarah Ogvile (2009). Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier. p. 70. ISBN 9780080877754. The destruction of the Armenian homeland and more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman government in 1915–1920 rendered most nonstadard varieties of modern Armenian moribund; with few exceptions the Armenians in the diaspora (primarily Lebanon, France, and notably in the Los Angeles area of the United States) speak only Standard Western Armenian.
  4. ^ Hovannisian, Richard, ed. (2003). Armenian Karin/Erzerum. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publ. p. 48. ISBN 9781568591513. Thus, even today the Erzerum dialect is widely spoken in the northernmost districts of the Armenian republic as well as in the Akhalkalak (Javakheti; Javakhk) and Akhaltskha (Akhaltsikh) districts of southern Georgia