The Basque Country is a stateless nation of western Europe.
In the last centuries, especially in the 20th, Basque suffered a significant setback due to many sociopolitical conflicts and has been at risk of extinction.
In the 60s, the standard Basque (a.k.a. Batua 'unified') was created, and the language grew gradually.
Due to the loss of the local historical varieties, the west-southern and high-northern Basque Country tend to appear blank in language maps throughout the literature, suggesting that no Basque is spoken there. However, it is worth noting that speaking Basque and a historical variety are different. This misconception arises from the lousy use of Zuazo’s (2014, 2019) dialect maps, employed to illustrate Basque in the Basque Country, rather than what it was meant to show, the current historical varieties of Basque.
Varieties of Basque (Zuazo, 2014, 2019)
Extent of the Basque language area (Britannica, n.d.)
Since the Normalization Laws in the BC (1982, 1986), the towns where the historical variety had disappeared reversed the sociolinguistic situation by learning standard Basque and adding it to their repertoire. It became the vernacular Basque of half of the Basque Country. Some Basque speakers are bidialectal (standard + a historical variety), and others are monodialectal (either the standard variety or the historical local one), just like in any other speaker community worldwide.
Currently, many lost historical varieties are just a vestige reflected in the spoken hegemonic language (French/Spanish), kept in the collective memory. Moreover, the Batua-speaking community is not disconnected from the rest since the Basque that the youth has learned in school often contains certain non-standard features, either local or general to the dialectal variety. Typically, it is primarily the phonology and the lexicon that have survived in the collective memory; for instance, the nouns for family members often preserve the phonological form of the area (amama/amoma/amuma, amona/amuna, amatxi). Although youngsters often employ the dialectal variants of the auxiliary verbs too to mark locality (dot, det, dut, düt). Thereupon, it would be more accurate to say that the varieties spoken in the "white areas" are different forms of localized standard Basque.
Basque varieties: historical dialects and standards (Banse & Franco-Landa, 2023)
Academic version:
Original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CzeYzTfMhgx/?igsh=MWhlMXhvMXk3a2U5dg==
Comments
Post a Comment