Dora Sakayan

Dora Sakayan
Dora Sakayan, photograph by Marine Anakhatounian

Dora Sakayan (born January 24, 1931), Professor of German Studies (retired), McGill University. Specializing initially as a Germanist, today she is known for her work in various areas of Applied Linguistics. Sakayan is also noted for pioneering Armenology in Canada, and introducing the two branches of the Armenian language, Western Armenian and Eastern Armenian, to 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 she 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. 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.”

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. Subsequently, 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), completing them 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.