History of the Basque Language: From the Discours of its Death to its Maintenance
- Autores: Xabier Erize Etxegarai
- Localización: The case of basque: Past, present and future / coord. por María José Azurmendi Ayerbe, Iñaki Martínez de Luna Pérez de Arriba, 2006, ISBN 978-84-609-9703-0, págs. 19-42
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
The discourse of the death of Euskara, the Basque language, has limitations in explaining the maintenance of the language. This article provides information on the main events in the sociolinguistic history of the Basque language. Taking the reality of Basque language maintenance as a starting point, the paper also discusses small language death discourse, which was predominant in the social sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries. This discourse emerges in connection with the common sense beliefs of modernity. The examination of the case of Uitzi, a village in Navarre, shows that Basque survived thanks to the active strategies of its speakers, through natural transmission, in bottom-up processes, and that the language was a positive value for the Basque speakers. Spanish exerted great pressure, but did not succeed in replacing Basque: the Basque speakers of Uitzi regarded it as a second language. The results have implications in current work to revitalise the language. In the future, the subject of lesser used language maintenance can point to fruitful lines of research, via interdisciplinary work between sociolinguistics and the social sciences closest to it.
