Forthcoming: Translation and commentary on Adjarian 1911 'Armenian dialectology'

Hossep Dolatian is a visiting scholar at Stony Brook University. He completed his PhD at Stony Brook university with a focus on Armenian morphophonology and mathematical linguistics. His main interest is the descriptive and theoretical documentation of Armenian, with a focus on lexical phonology and other areas of the morphology-phonology interface.

George Balabanian is a Canadian class action lawyer and linguist. He is now in the final year of his doctorate program at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Armenian dialectology, morphology-phonology interface, Indo-European, with a particular emphasis on the application of computational models to diachronic issues. He is also a polyglot and translator.

Bert Vaux (PhD Harvard, 1994) is Professor of Phonology and Morphology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow in Linguistics at King’s College, Cambridge. He is primarily interested in phenomena that shed light on the structure and origins of the phonological component of grammar, especially in the realms of psychophonology, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. He also enjoys working with native speakers to document endangered languages, especially dialects of Armenian, Abkhaz, and English.

Hratchia Adjarian was born in Constantinople in 1876, and undertook an education in linguistics in France. He is considered the founder of modern Armenian dialectology. Early in his career, he published "Les explosives de l’ancien arménien étudiées dans les dialectes modernes" (translation included in this work) in which he developed an experimental procedure in a phonetics laboratory for Armenian consonant acoustics, where he discovered voice onset time (VOT) 65 years before Lisker & Abramson (1964). His first major work was "Classification des dialectes arméniens" (1909) where he catalogued, described, and classified a large set of Armenian dialects. This French monograph was then the basis for a larger work in Armenian «Հայ Բարբառագիտութիւն» [Armenian Dialectology] (1911). After surviving the genocide, he repatriated himself to Soviet Armenia where he taught at Yerevan State University from 1923 until his death in 1953. He also became a founding member of the Armenian Academy of Sciences when it was established in 1943. The Institute of Language of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia is named after him. Other important works include «Հայերէն գաւառական բառարան» [Armenian Provincial Dictionary] (1913), and eleven dialect descriptions form the basic corpus of dialectological data compiled in a massive work entitled «Հայոց լեզվի պատմություն» [History of the Armenian Language] (1940, 1951). He is also celebrated for his posthumous seven-volume «Լիակատար քերականություն հայոց լեզվի» [Comprehensive Grammar of the Armenian Language] (1955-1971), and especially his crowning work, «Հայերէն արմատական բառարան» [Armenian Etymological Dictionary] in four volumes (1971–1979, original handwritten volumes written in 1926). He also produced a series of monographs devoted to the examination of specific dialects.