Announcing Bambas

I love words. I love what they reveal when we stop long enough to really look at them.

As a sociolinguist, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the relationships people have with language: the languages we speak, the ones we understand but hesitate to use, the ones we inherit, and the ones we wish we knew better. Armenian in particular can carry enormous emotional weight.

We worry about it. We debate it. We measure ourselves, and sometimes one another, against it. But language should also be fun. There is real joy in discovering why we say what we say, where a word came from, why someone else says it differently, or what a familiar expression has been quietly carrying all along.

That is the spirit behind BamBas: language un(dis)covered, a new monthly series from the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies. Each newsletter begins small, with a word, an expression, a linguistic puzzle, and follows it down many possible threads: into history, migration, dialect, humor, family, or the wonderfully complicated ways Armenians actually speak.

BamBas is not a language lesson. It is for fluent speakers and non-speakers, Eastern and Western Armenian speakers, heritage speakers, and anyone simply curious about Armenian. We will move through the Armenian of Yerevan and Beirut, Tehran and Artsakh, Istanbul and Los Angeles; through dictionaries and kitchens, classrooms and family conversations. Sometimes a single word can carry a whole geography, a history of migration, or a way of seeing the world.

At the Institute, we have made language an important part of how we connect scholarship with broader publics. Language Therapy with Dr. K, including our special Armenian-language season with Dr. Hrach Martirosyan, and our Word of the Day series invite us to look more closely at language and ask questions we may never have thought to ask. BamBas grows out of that same commitment, but with its own playful premise: one small discovery at a time.

I conceived BamBas as a space for exactly this kind of curiosity and am delighted to be collaborating with linguistic anthropologist Dr. Lilit Ghazaryan on the research and writing of each installment. Together with our Institute team, we shape each story for the newsletter, original visual graphics, and social media.

And the name BamBas? There is a story there, too.

You’ll have to wait for Issue 2.

For now, read, discover, share, and tell us how you say it. Look for the first issue in your inbox, next week!