In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

139 c h a p t e r s i x Beyond the Classroom n e w ta c t i c s f o r n e w t i m e s Language revitalization is, and really has to be, a dynamic and evolving process. In the sixties, the priorities of advocates were to secure official status for Basque, to standardize it for written use, and to spread the teaching of it to the general population . But by the late eighties and nineties, a new set of concerns and priorities was emerging for Basque-language loyalists. Chief among these was to move beyond increasing language competency to encouraging language use. How could advocates motivate people who had learned Basque to use it beyond the home, beyond the pamphlet, and beyond the classroom? Along with this greater focus on language use came a perceived sense of urgency, especially acute among nongovernmental activists, to disentangle language revival from the nationalist problematic and, indeed, to sever any connection to “politics” at all. These two concerns—with increasing usage and decreasing politicization—inform the new directions in language activism that were taken at this time. Without abandoning the aspiration of a national-language movement, new strategies and organizations emerged in civil society that were oriented toward a less explicitly political and more communitybased activism, intent on normalizing the use of Basque in the everyday life of their own communities. Tracking these developments shifted the spatial practices of my fieldwork from the kind of in-depth dwelling in a single place for which ethnography is known to tracing the broader network of groups in this new wave of community activism. Returning to the Basque Country for several periods of fieldwork in the 1990s, I continued to live in Usurbil but found myself spending more of my time in a car traveling the highways as well as smaller windy roads of Euskal Herria, on the trail of the boom in local cultural associations and media projects around the southern Basque Country. Interviews and workshops took me from the small, predominantly Basque-speaking towns of Arretxabaleta and Aulesti to the diverse, industrial urban centers of Lasarte-Oria, Renteria/Orerreta, and Arrasate/Mondragón and to the capital cities of Gasteiz, Donostia, Bilbo, and Iruñea. I negotiated my way down congested city streets and cobblestone lanes, sat—sometimes in cafés or busy modern offices, other times in damp, uncomfortable basement rooms— 140  r e cl a i m i ng b a s q u e talking, tape-recording, and taking notes with volunteers in community languageadvocacy groups, leaders in grassroots language organizations, people in Basque publishing, and an emerging corps of municipal language professionals dedicated to taking language revitalization beyond the classroom.1 While the developments I describe go well beyond the town of Usurbil, living there offered me a context in which to observe the formation and workings of the kind of local-community language activism that I was hearing about in my interviews. This research—carried out largely in 1998—is the basis for the story I want to tell about the shifting strategies and discourses of the grassroots language movement . Drawing from a dozen formal interviews, many informal conversations, documents, and observations, I reconstruct the frustrations that nongovernmental language advocates in the 1990s were experiencing and the new organizations and strategies they created to meet the challenges they were encountering. Fruit of their reflections in the late eighties was the proliferation of euskara elkarteak, community-based Basque cultural associations that, among other things, sought to promote language normalization through local television and magazines. In the vision nongovernmental language loyalists had of the political context in which they were embedded, as well as the repertoire of practices and representations that they turned to for reorienting their activities, one can see the important role that theories of language scholars and other expert discourses play in the field of language activism. These theories provide models of language and conceptual tools that language loyalists use both to understand the social life of language and to strategize about how best to advance the process of language normalization.2 Grassroots language activism in the nineties changed significantly as theorists and strategies of the past receded and new ones took their place. Txepetx succeeded Txillardegi as the theorist who ignited the imagination of activists. His work provided them with a theory of language revitalization framed in terms of ecology and multiculturalism, in contrast to the frameworks of...

Share