Dora Sakayan

Dora Sakayan (classical Armenian orthography: Դորա Սաքայեան Dora Sak'ayean; reformed: Դորա Սաքայան Dora Sak'ayan; born January 24, 1931), Professor of German Studies (retired), McGill University.

Specializing initially as a Germanist, today she is also known for her work in various areas of Applied Linguistics and Armenology.

Sakayan is noted for pioneering Armenology in Canada and for her books and articles published in her series "Armenian Studies for the English-speaking World."

Sakayan was born in 1931 in Salonica, Greece, to Armenian parents who had escaped the Armenian genocide.

She grew up in a multilingual environment, with her first languages being Western Armenian and Modern Greek, and received early exposure to German, French and Turkish.

After immigrating to Soviet Armenia, she received her education in Eastern Armenian and Russian.

Later on, she mastered English and learned other languages.

Sakayan received her elementary education at the Armenian Gulabi Gulbenkian School in Salonica.

She then attended the local German high school Deutsche Schule Saloniki.

In 1946, Sakayan's family repatriated to Soviet Armenia where she completed her secondary education.

In 1948, she was admitted to the Yerevan State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (YSPL) where she graduated with a diploma in Germanic linguistics and in Pedagogy in 1952.

She was then appointed as an instructor of German at YSPL, where she taught from 1952 to 1956.

In 1957, she was invited to teach in the Department of Romance and Germanic Philology at Yerevan State University (YSU, 1956–1958).

Sakayan began her graduate studies in Germanic philology in 1958 at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (LMSU) and graduated in 1961.

Over the following four years, she shared her time between Moscow and Yerevan to pursue her teaching duties in Germanic Philology at YSU and complete her PhD thesis while raising her two young children.

She obtained her PhD in Germanic Philology from Moscow Lomonosov University in 1965.

In 1965, Sakayan became Head of the Department of Foreign languages of YSU, a position she held for ten years.

At the same time, she lectured in the Department of Romance-Germanic Philology of YSU.

Sakayan immigrated to Canada in January 1975 and began to teach German at two universities: McGill University, (Department of German Studies) and the Université de Montréal (Department of Études des langues anciennes et modernes).

In 1977, she was offered a full-time position at McGill and left Université de Montréal.

Due to her high ratings as an instructor of German at McGill, in 1978 she was offered a joint appointment with the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies where she taught for ten years.

Over the years, Sakayan rose to the rank of Full Professor at McGill University.

In 1981, Sakayan began her groundbreaking work in Armenian Studies at McGill.

At the Centre of Continuing Education, she founded and supervised a program of credited Armenian courses anchored in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies.

She edited and prepared for publication a number of Armenological manuscripts of linguistic, literary and historic interest, translated several books and articles from Armenian into other languages and vice versa, and made book tours.

She became a regular participant at international Armenological conferences and congresses, and she also organized Armenological conferences in Canada and Armenia.

Seeing her mission in presenting Armenian language and culture to non-Armenians, she founded the series "Armenian Studies for the English Speaking World" and published a number of scholarly books and articles under this heading.

To promote the publication of her Armenological books, in 1997 she founded a small press under the name AROD Books in Montreal.

After 25 years of service at McGill University, Sakayan retired from the Department of German Studies in 2000 and dedicated herself fully to Armenian Studies.

She renewed her ties with Yerevan State University, where she regularly spends a few months every year, participating in scholarly projects, organizing international linguistic conferences, publishing her books with YSU Press and organizing book launches at YSU and elsewhere in Armenia.

Among many activities in her homeland, one is especially noteworthy: for more than 15 years, and in collaboration with her former student, Evelina Makaryan, who has recently retired, Sakayan has translated several books related to the Armenian genocide from German into Armenian.

At the same time, Sakayan continues the promotion of Armenian Studies in Canada.

In 2005, she founded an Armenian language program at the Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Montreal, carrying on a tradition that she established more than three decades ago (in 1981) at the Centre of Continuing Education at McGill University.

As a Germanist and educator in the East European tradition, Sakayan has received training in Germanic linguistics and language pedagogy.

This background has led her to applied linguistics, and from the great variety of its interdisciplinary branches Sakayan has concentrated on the following areas: a) contrastive linguistics, b) foreign language acquisition, c) translation studies.

Sakayan includes into the contrastive discussion, besides German, other Indo-European languages: Russian, English, French, and Modern Greek.

As an innovation, she also includes Armenian, a non-European language whose agglutinative properties set it apart from other languages in the Indo-European family.

In fact, in Sakayan's work, contrastive analysis is predominantly based on Armenian, and other languages are viewed through the prism of this language.

The objectives of such an endeavor are to establish language typologies and to identify areas of difficulty in foreign language acquisition.

She was 11 years old when her family moved to Vienna, Austria, where she pursued her high school education at the Gymnasium for girls in the 7th District of Vienna "Oberschule für Mädchen, Wien VII."