Epitaphs Talking of Life: Respect Markers and Social Mobility in the Armenian Diaspora of 17th–19th-Century India

This study examines how address forms and honorific titles functioned as markers of politeness, status, and social positioning within the Armenian merchant diaspora in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on 128 Armenian funerary inscriptions from the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP1721), the article analyses titles and respect markers carved on gravestones in Madras, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. Using digital epigraphy, corpus annotation, and contact pragmatics, the study traces the evolution of honorific systems across three prestige frameworks: Armenian ecclesiastical hierarchy, Persianate administrative culture, and British colonial civic titles. Early inscriptions emphasize genealogical and geographic origin within transregional networks, while later monuments increasingly incorporate colonial titles and bilingual Armenian–English address forms. Rather than replacing heritage forms, new honorifics accumulate alongside traditional ones, indexing multiple audiences simultaneously. Read against the history of the New Julfa merchant network, this trajectory records a shift in the basis of prestige from communal reputation to institutional recognition. The article expands the methodological scope of heritage-language pragmatics by demonstrating how migrant communities encode hierarchy, prestige, and belonging in durable commemorative genres.