Meet Anaïd Donabédian-Démopoulos, specialist linguist in Western Armenian (SeDYL)
The collection "Portraits of Researchers in Area Studies" (PEA) is a series of large-format interviews produced by Inalco as part of the Language and Cultural Area Studies (LaCAS) project. Deposited on the MediHal open archive, this series of portraits joins a set of collections on the LaCAS platform. These collections aim to build a living, freely accessible scientific heritage of research on the world's languages, societies and cultures.
Large-format portrait
Video: Challenges and developments in Armenian studies in France. An interview with Anaïd Donabedian-Demopoulos (Inalco).
An interview conducted by Bastien Sepúlveda, in charge of Digital Humanities (DIRVED, Inalco), directed by Dimitri Galitzine, produced by Inalco (11/10/2024, 95mn).
Podcast:
Anaïd Donabedian-Demopoulos is a linguist and professor of Armenian studies at Inalco. A specialist in Western Armenian, she conducts her research within the Structure and Dynamics of Languages laboratory (SeDyL, UMR 8202), which she helped found and of which she was also the founder and first director between 2010 and 2013. Here, she looks back on her research and teaching career and experiences, at the crossroads of linguistics and Armenian studies. She thus successively evokes her role in setting up the International Master of Armenian Studies (IMAS), in refounding the Society for Armenian Studies (SEA), or her participation, as deputy director between 2011 and 2024, in the LabEx Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL).
She was a visiting professor at the American University of Beirut as part of the Institute for Development Research between 2013 and 2016, and editorial director of the journal Faits de Langues from 2012 to 2022.
Parallel to her research and teaching work, Anaïd Donabédian is the author of several scientific books, including Langues de diaspora, langues en contact, Faits de Langue (Ophrys, 18/2001); Formalizing Natural Languages with NooJ, (with V. Khurshudyan, M. Silberztein, Cambridge Scholar Press, 2013); and Krikor Beledian and Contemporary Armenian Literature, (Inalco Presses, 2021), co-edited with S. Dvoyan, S and V. Khurshudyan.
As a specialist in Western Armenian, she has published numerous articles devoted to linguistic description, sociolinguistics, corpus analysis and automatic language processing. She is a member of the LACIM network, where she has given the introductory course in the series dedicated to Armenian, as part of the international program on the languages of Anatolia, the Caucasus, Iran and Mesopotamia. She is also co-author, with Ioanna Sitaridou, of the Anatolia chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact edited in 2020 by E. Adamou and Y. Matras.
She is also active in the field of translation: she is an expert for Armenian at the Centre national du livre (CNL) and has co-translated several literary works including: L'enchaîné. Jeu théâtral du Moyen Âge arménien by Levon Shant (Editions L'Espace d'un instant, 2003); L'Imbécile by Vahram Martirosyan (L'Asiathèque, reed. 2022) in collaboration with his students, as well as Le Petit Nicolas en arménien (IMAV Editions, 2020).
Committed to the vitality of the Western Armenian language, she has initiated several events, symposia and programs to promote research among professionals and the general public with a view to fostering its transmission. In particular, she coordinated the Parastan.fr project, a bilingual French-Western Armenian online thematic dictionary collecting over 35,000 words in Western Armenian, available since 2018.
She was principal co-author of the program "L'ordre des mots dans les langues du monde" in the multimedia terminal D'une langue à l'autre at the Musée du quai Branly (winner in 2006 of the "Multimédi'Art d'argent" awarded by Avicom (international committee for audiovisual and new image and sound technologies) at the Festival International de l'Audiovisuel et des Multimédias sur le Patrimoine (FIAMP).