Article

Name: “The City Speaks”. About the Tiflis Vernacular Urban Language on the Example of Signage and Advertising Inscriptions

Authors: Yervand G. Margaryan

Russian-Armenian University, Yerevan, Armenia

Abstract:

The article deals with the Creole urban language of Old Tiflis. Nowadays, there is almost no evidence of the existence of this language, since there are almost no native speakers left, just as there is no written evidence of its existence. The Tiflis city language was exclusively an oral, unwritten language. Only fragmentary mentions of this language have reached us in the works of Aghasi Ayvazyan, Joseph Grishashvili and other singers of old Tiflis. Samples of this urban language have been preserved in advertising signs and paintings by Tiflis primitive artists. The Tiflis language was a kind of Koine, which arose on the basis of Armenian, Georgian, Russian, Tatar and Persian languages. A. Ayvazyan called it Tiflis Esperanto. This creolized urban language was an instrumental, convenient, flexible and democratic means of interethnic communication within a closed urban space. The villagers did not own this instrument and did not understand the urban residents who spoke it well. The townspeople did not hide their contempt for the provincials, who understood only one dialect (Gurian, Khevsurian, Kakhetian, Lori, Akhaltsikhe or Svan).

In the post-reform period, as the bourgeois nations (Armenian, Russian, Georgian, Azerbaijani) were formed, the medieval urban republican language degraded. The spontaneously developing, occasional, unwritten language was replaced by national literary languages, with canonical usage and linguistic purism characteristic of rational bourgeois languages. A characteristic detail is that the classics of Armenian and Georgian literature, who formed and developed the literary languages of modern times, knew and remembered the medieval urban language, echoes of which can still be heard in their works, if desired.

Keywords: urban language, old Tiflis, urban folklore, advertising signs

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