At the Wikimedia CEE Meeting in Cluj-Napoca in September, I opened my talk by asking the room a question. Who here has heard of Western Armenian? A fair number of hands went up. Who knew about it two years ago? Fewer. Five years ago? Fewer still. Ten years ago? The hands came down slowly, one by one, until there were almost none left.

Then I introduced myself properly. Western Armenian is one of the two standard forms of modern Armenian. It is the diaspora one, spoken across Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Greece, France, Argentina, Canada, the United States and so many more. No country administers it. It is not an official language anywhere; it has no ministry and no national broadcaster, and it received its own ISO language code, hyw, only in 2018. Its Wikipedia launched in 2019. Before that, our articles lived inside Armenian Wikipedia with a tag banner.…