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Introduction
- University of Nevada Press
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1 Introduction In 1963 a group of idealistic youth who had recently formed the revolutionary group eta Basqueland and Freedom declared in their magazine Zutik! [Arise!]: “The day that Basque ceases to be a spoken language, the Basque nation will have died and, in a few years, the descendants of today’s Basques will be simply Spanish or French” (Jáuregui 1981: 160). After the death of the dictator Francisco Franco almost twenty years later, Spain was reconfigured into a quasi-federal political system of autonomous communities. Soon after achieving its autonomy, the newly created regional Basque government, representing a much more moderate sector of the political spectrum than Basqueland and Freedom, nevertheless expressed a similar sense of compelling urgency about Basque-language revival in its first political program: “The Basque community has become aware in a gradually more intense and, given the circumstances, more desperate fashion, of the capital importance of Basque, understood simultaneously as a national language, as a fundamental sign of our community, and as a genuine instrument of thought and creativity. . . . Today we are completely convinced that Euzkadi will never be fully realized, in the full sense of the word, if the Basque language dies” (Eusko Jaurlaritza 1980: 72–73). Yet another twenty years later, on the cusp of the new millennium , this commitment was renewed once again as thousands of citizens in a coordinated simulcast event filled four soccer stadiums in capital cities across the Basque territory to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Basque language campaign Bai Euskarari! [Yes to the Basque Language!]. As a unique, non–Indo European language, Basque enjoys a kind of mysterious status in Europe. It is a language isolate with no known relation to any other existing language. It is spoken today by approximately 750,000 people, or about a third of the population who live in a geographic territory of the western Pyrenees spanning four provinces in northern Spain and three in France. The territory of Euskal Herria is larger than the three provinces that make up the contemporary Basque Autonomous Community of Spain—Araba, Gipuzkoa, and Bizkaia (see map 1). It is considered by many Basques to be a distinct nation and the homeland of the Basque language, Euskara, the traces of which can be found on archaeological 2 r e c l a i m i n g b a s q u e remains dating back to the Neolithic (Trask 1997).1 Contemporary Basque speakers are spread unevenly over this territory. In the province of Gipuzkoa, Basque speakers make up close to half the population. In the Gipuzkoan town where I lived during much of my research, the percentage of speakers is closer to 70 percent . In other areas like the province of Araba or the south of Nafarroa, Basque speakers can be few and far between.2 This complex and uneven linguistic landscape is due to a process of what scholars call language shift (Gal 1979; Fishman 1991) that had been going on for several centuries and became especially accelerated after the middle of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, language shift had led to a situation some sociolinguists call diglossia, in which the state languages—Castilian in the southern Spanish side, French in the northern territories—dominated as the taken-forgranted languages of education, commerce, and public life, while Basque survived largely as a home language. Language shift turned Basque for a long time into a Bay of Biscay Nafarroa Zuberoa FRANCE Nafarroa Beherea Lapurdi Bizkaia Gipuzkoa Araba SPAIN SPAIN Bay of Biscay FRANCE PORTUGAL Mediterranean Sea Basque Autonomous Community Foral Autonomous Community of Navarre N 0 20 mi 0 20 km Map 1. The seven provinces that make up the territory known as Euskal Herria. The three provinces of Araba, Gipuzkoa, and Bizkaia make up the contemporary Basque Autonomous Community, constituted in 1979. [3.91.8.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:23 GMT) Introduction 3 language associated mainly with the countryside, spoken largely by farmers and fishing folk, few of whom knew how to read or write in it. As we will see in more detail, socioeconomic changes, especially industrialization and urbanization, labor migration, as well as mandatory schooling worked together with deliberate state repression to accelerate Basque-language abandonment . In France formal state policies to eliminate Basque took shape at the time of the French Revolution. The ideologues of the French Republic viewed Basque, along with other regional languages, as obstacles to the spread of civic culture, liberty...