1 The Armenian dialect of Khodorjur 1 Bert Vaux September 2012 1. Introduction Though Armenian dialectologists tend not to discuss the Khodorjur dialect, it possesses a number of features that should make it of interest to armenologists and general linguists alike. In this chapter I provide a bird’s eye view of the dialect (which now sadly appears to be dead 2 ) and some of its more noteworthy characteristics, and situate these within their larger linguistic and armenological contexts. One question that immediately arises in light of Khodorjur’s location at the nexus between the historical Ottoman and Russian empires, which more or less contained Western and Eastern dialects of Armenian respectively, is whether Khodorjur belongs to the Western or the Eastern branch of Armenian dialects. The available evidence suggests that with respect to most diagnostics Khodorjur belongs to the Western group, though as we might expect at the boundary between East and West, it does contain some features more characteristic of the Eastern dialects, such as the preservation of the original Armenian 2nd singular pronoun դու [du] (> Khodorjur դու [d h u]), which Western dialects typically augment with a final -n (e.g. SWA դուն [t h un]). This can be seen for example in the following sentence from H&H 419: 1 In order to make the materials discussed here accessible to both lay Armenians and linguists, I have provided transcriptions of all dialect forms in both the Armenian script and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA values for the Armenian letters can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IPA_for_Armenian . For ease of bibliographic reference, literature is transcribed in the American Library Association-Library of Congress system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Armenian#Transliteration_table). Abbreviations employed in this chapter: H&H = Hulunean and Hachean 1964, SWA = Standard Western Armenian, SEA = Standard Eastern Armenian. 2 The last mention I have been able to find of the dialect being spoken is by Petrosyan et al. (1975:167), who state that at that time speakers existed in Black Sea coastal cities such as Sukhumi, Sochi, Adler, and Gagra.