You must know the Written Armenian

Positive amendments have been made to the Language Law. They just have to enforce it.

 On June 10 president of the RA Serzh Sargsyan signed Language Law Amendments and Addenda, Commercial Law Amendments and Administrative Infringements Code Amendments and Addenda bills adopted by the National Assembly on May 23. That package is a legislative initiative of ARF faction MPs Lilit Galstyan, Ara Nranyan, Artsvik Minasyan, Armen Rustamyan, Hrayr Karapetyan, Bagrat Sargsyan and Artyush Shahbazyan, by which particularly to the Language Law was made the following addendum, “The Republic of Armenia contributes to the canonizing of the Written Armenian, the elaboration of the principles of the word-creation, terminology, orthography, orthoepy, transliteration and punctuation.” If Article 3 of the Language Law stipulated, “Officials and the citizens of the Republic of Armenia who work in different service spheres have to know good Armenian”, after the amendment they have to know good “Written Armenian”. In the same way, they have changed other clauses of the law and now they are as follows, “The language of the official speeches of the Republic of Armenia representatives is the Written Armenian. The citizens of the Republic of Armenia have to retain the purity of the Written Armenian in the official speech.” Article 4 was written with the following edition, the state organs, enterprises, institutions and organizations of the RA must “do the office work in Written Armenian securing the purity of the Armenian language and the stipulated language rules.” It was also stipulated that during the TV shows, the Armenian translation of the non-Armenian speeches must be provided and all means of commercials must be formed in Armenian.

 The violating of the commercials general demands leads to the punishment according to the Administrative Infringements Code. Also the fines, stipulated by that code, for the following have been doubled and tripled; not providing the tuition in Armenian in the educational organizations of Armenia or the Armenian language admission exam, “Doing the office work in the non-Armenian language by the RA state organs, enterprises, institutions and organizations (notwithstanding the type of ownership), not forming the posters, blanks, excises, stamps, seals, international postal envelopes and commercials in Armenian”, “Not knowing good Armenian by the officials and the RA citizens working in different service spheres.” The stipulated fines are now from 100 thousand to 350 thousand.

One of the co-authors of the initiative Lilit Galstyan reminded during our conversation, “We stipulated in the Commercial Law that the commercial language in the Republic of Armenia is Armenian. However, the frequent distortions were awful; we have 500 examples of posters in the Kentron district of Yerevan alone with only foreign language commercials. On the public and other TV channels the foreign language commercials are also broadcasted, which is a violation of the law.” In response to our remark that fines have been stipulated by the law in the past too, however we do not remember that any official was fined even in small amount for not knowing good Armenian, Lilit Galstyan reminded that the Language Inspection supervised the enforcement of all this, “I think our initiative is a serious legislative amendment in regard to securing the Armenian language. However, it is a serious problem; if the law exists, but it does not work, it has no value. When they found out about this initiative on Facebook, someone wrote, you struggle in vain; these are people without homeland. I do not want to voice things like this. However, I remind that the language is our origins, our Homeland, our self-identity.”