ABSTRACT
Every few months, an email appears in the author's inbox. The emails come from Armenian Americans of a certain age who, while cleaning out their basements and attics, find old letters and journals written in a language they may have learned to prattle in, but never learned to read. This linguistic estrangement in the diaspora led the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to classify the language in 2010 as definitely endangered, the third degree on a six-degree scale between safe and extinct. The challenge of holding linguistic legitimacy was ultimately put into words and theorized by twentieth-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Western Armenian, the present is not just a tense; it is a form of ideological exhibitionism. In revitalizing endangered languages, there is a tendency to look to the past for sources of linguistic legitimacy, cementing the assumption that the past is authentic and the present is adulterated.
