No sooner had the Eurovision passions subsided than the Armenian public was engaged into another debate on a sensitive subject – the purity of the Armenian language and its protection.

Complaints made by Armenian linguists through the press and television over the quality of language being used in public speaking are not a novelty. The debate, however, was given a fresh impetus late last week as Armenia for the sixth subsequent year observed February 21 as the UNESCO-declared International Mother Language Day (UNESCO has observed it since 1999).

Armenia’s Diaspora Ministry has declared 2010 as the Year of the Mother Tongue and Reading in Armenia. At a press conference late last week Diaspora Minister Hranush Hakobyan said that officials in the country should be in the forefront of guarding the purity of language and also called for efforts to ensure a high quality of television and internet language.

The main complaint of Armenian linguists concerns television which they say is full of programs with incorrect Armenian, which immediately affects particularly the language used by minors.

Mariam Kirakosyan, a lecturer at the department of philology at Yerevan State University, is one of such critics. She believes that television companies should not find excuses by saying that they show what the people want to watch.

“If the material is meaningful and is in pure Armenian, a TV viewer will watch it with great pleasure,” says Kirakosyan.

Writers’ Union Chairman Levon Ananyan and many other “elder generation” writers level their criticism at the modern writers whose works contain foul language, vulgarities and excessive use of jargon.

Karen Antashyan, a 27-year-old writer who authored the book “Antashat: Poetry 78%”, does not consider himself to be a writer who goes against ‘classical’ language by using extreme and low-level jargon, dialect and street language. Yet, he says he treats normally such occasional attempts in modern Armenian literature. Antashyan says he is against literature that “adds nothing to the language.”

“It is very important to realize that language is a living body and one should not be afraid of language metamorphoses and should not protect it as a jealously parent would ‘protect’ his or her child from growing up. A sense of measure and literary intuition are important in ‘updating’ the literary layer of the language, because after all any language layer has a ‘use by’ date,” says Antashyan.

In the young writer’s opinion, there is no need for protecting the Armenian language (because he says it is a museum item, i.e. something dead, that needs protecting), but ideas are needed on how to develop the language.

“I think that one should feel concerned not over the quality of the Armenian language, but over the literacy of its native speakers. As long as oral language remains dominant over written language and as long as our people read less or do not read at all, this oral language will continue to go in roundabout ways,” says Antashyan.

The writer also thinks that internet content in Armenian and creation of digital means of learning Armenian should be increased for the fourth generation of Diaspora Armenians who no longer speak the language.

“And generally languages like Armenian that have so few native speakers in the globalizing world are at risk of dying. However, in my ‘chauvinistic’ opinion, the death of the language of some African tribe and the Armenian do not have the same value for world culture. In any case, the Armenian language is the most ancient living language,” says Antashyan.

Hrazdan Madoyan, a senior lecturer at the Yerevan State University after Valeri Bryusov, thinks that attention should first of all be paid to ensuring good standard Armenian on television to cope with the situation.

“It is people who appear on television every day or frequently who should speak good Armenian in the first place,” says the senior linguist.