Purist Pursuits

Purist Pursuits chronicles how and why Armenians in the Ottoman Empire fashioned a new language called Western Armenian. Tracing its rise from the eighteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, Jennifer Manoukian studies the evolution of an ever-changing ideology that undergirded all phases of the language's formation: linguistic purism. Constituting the primary preoccupation of the Ottoman Armenian intelligentsia, linguistic purism dictated that Armenians needed to abandon Turkish loanwords and fundamentally alter the way they wrote and spoke. While linguistic purism continues to be a powerful force throughout the Armenian diaspora today, its historical roots have not been explored until now.

With this book, Jennifer Manoukian reimagines what language histories can be for Ottoman-era language communities. She is the first to expose Western Armenian as an ideologically fueled project and to examine the power of global intellectual movements in crafting new language ideologies in the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on untapped Armenian-language sources published in Istanbul, Izmir, Venice, and Vienna, she underscores how examining shifts in attitudes, anxieties, and debates about language can serve as indicators of ideological change and reveal unarticulated global linkages. Ultimately, her work charts a new course in the study of language in the Ottoman Empire.