Purist Pursuits: Language, Global Ideas, and the Creation of Western Armenian in the Ottoman Empire

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 ...