LOS ANGELES — The USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies, in partnership with the Armenian Communities Department of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is pleased to announce the full program of It Takes a Diaspora to Raise a Language: Future Directions for Armenian, an interdisciplinary conference to be held February 27–March 1, 2026, at the University of Southern California, Taper Hall of Humanities, in Los Angeles.
At the heart of the conference is a central, forward-looking question: How can the Armenian language thrive in the Diaspora? Rather than centering narratives of loss or decline, the conference intentionally shifts the focus to examples of innovation, creativity, and success—highlighting initiatives, strategies, and targeted efforts that sustain and invigorate Armenian in its literary standards as well as its colloquial and dialectal forms, across generations and geographies.
The program is designed to foster dialogue between research and on-the-ground experience, featuring a mix of academic panels, roundtables, keynote lectures, live conversations, and practitioner showcases. This structure encourages exchange across disciplines and professional roles, emphasizing collaboration between scholars and those actively engaged in language education, cultural production, and community work.
Over three days, participants will address themes including language policy and assessment, heritage language transmission, early childhood and university-level language education, translanguaging and immersion models, creative and artistic language practices, journalism, artificial intelligence, and the future of Armenian in digital spaces. The program foregrounds both Western and Eastern Armenian, featuring global perspectives from Armenia, the Middle East, Europe, North America, and Latin America.
Keynote addresses by Dr. Ruth Kircher and Dr. Maria Polinsky anchor the program, alongside sessions that spotlight innovative pedagogical approaches, creative language use in digital and artistic spaces, and emerging models of language revitalization. By centering diasporic agency and experimentation, It Takes a Diaspora to Raise a Language aims to chart practical and hopeful pathways for the future of Armenian.
The conference is free of charge and open to the public. Its working languages are English and Armenian. RSVP is required.
