Armenian voice over services

Most languages that split do it geographically inside one country. Armenian did not. It has two standard varieties, and the line between them runs between Armenia and the communities that live outside it.

Eastern Armenian is the language of the Republic of Armenia and of the community in Iran — what you hear on television in Yerevan. Western Armenian is the language the Ottoman Armenians carried with them, and it is the language of the diaspora: Lebanon, Syria, the United States, France, Argentina.

These are not accents. They differ in consonant voicing — a sound that is /b/ in one is /p/ in the other — and in parts of the verb system. A speaker of one follows the other with effort rather than fluently. So the casting question is binary and it is worth asking early: is this content going to Armenia, or to the diaspora? In our experience the commissioning organisation is often diaspora-based even when the content is aimed at Armenia, so the answer is less obvious than it looks.

There is a dimension here that is not technical. Western Armenian is classified by UNESCO as endangered: its speech community was dispersed in 1915 and has sustained the language outside its territory of origin for a century since. For a client commissioning in Western Armenian, that is usually part of why they are commissioning at all.

One more thing that shapes the work: Armenian has its own alphabet, created in 405, and it sits on its own branch of Indo-European with no close relatives. No neighbouring language offers a shortcut, for casting or for translation. Typical work is corporate video and internal communications, eLearning, community and cultural content, museum and heritage audio, public-information material and broadcast and diaspora media.