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23 c h a p t e r o n e Language Loyalism’s Early Roots Advocacy on behalf of the Basque language has a long history that begins well before the Franco era and even before the appearance of a Basque nationalist movement. Recovering that legacy of advocacy and disseminating a fuller understanding of Euskara’s past has been an important part of the contemporary language struggle. Exposés on early euskaltzaleak [Basque language loyalists] were common in Basque cultural magazines of the seventies and eighties. These early scholars and writers served as a pantheon of ancestors whose work is seen as having paved the way for present-day revival efforts. To convey some of this history of Basque language advocacy, I focus on three discursive moments widely considered to be pivotal in the history of language loyalism . The first of these is the publication of a dictionary and grammar in defense of Basque in the eighteenth century by the Jesuit scholar Manuel de Larramendi. The second is the florescence of the Euskal Pizkundea, a Basque literary and folkloric revival, and the emergence of the first Basque nationalist party in the late nineteenth century. Although there are many important figures in Basque revival from this era, I consider two principal political figures who were greatly concerned with the Basque language: the writer and lawyer Arturo Campión and Sabino Arana de Goiri, the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party. While they had many profound disagreements over politics, Campión and Arana are exemplary of the kind of nostalgic ruralist view of Basque language and culture that prevailed in this period. The third discursive moment takes place in the early twentieth century with the foundation of the Eusko Ikaskuntza [The Basque Studies Society] and Euskaltzaindia [The Basque Language Academy] in 1918. Though the latter two institutions are often portrayed as a part of the same generalized florescence of Basque nationalism and cultural revival of which Campión and Arana are a part, I think it wise to consider them separately. I argue that something quite distinct and important in the approach to language emerges with these latter institutions. The largely progressive reformers of The Basque Studies Society define and legitimate a decidedly modern sociological perspective on language that laid the foundations for the discourse of “language planning” that was to come. In juxtaposing these 24  r e cl a i m i ng b a s q u e three discursive moments, my aim is to show that within the verifiable longue durée of language loyalism, there are notable shifts in the way that loyalists understood the relationship between language and something we might call national identity. Basque has been admired, defended, as well as attacked for a very long time, but not always in the same way or for the same reasons. A comparison of these different moments in language loyalism shows us that what we have is not so much a linear progression, but a set of somewhat discrepant conceptualizations that in many ways continue to circulate and bear upon the language movement today. In examining the discourse about language, I try to avoid some of the problems that often plague histories of language revival. One of these problems is the tendency to view the past as a continuous expression of loyalty to language that endures unchanged over time. My own view is that there are important shifts in what Basque meant to language loyalists of the past and what it means in the present . Equally problematic are what I would call “superstructural” explanations of language revival. In the latter, language tends to be treated mainly as a political symbol in the struggle for some other form of power. In these kinds of approaches, language revival is not seen as a real issue, but rather as a guise for the pursuit of class or regional ethnic-elite interests or both. The issue is not whether language politics intersects with other axes of power and interests. Of course they do, and we should explore those intersections. But language advocacy is not necessarily reducible to those other struggles. In my own reading of these historical moments and treatises I take a third way that seeks to gain insight into the shifting nature of language ideology and to identify underlying assumptions, tensions, as well as rationalities that may be at work in contemporary language revival. Larramendi and the Antiquity of Basque The first written accounts discussing the origins and antiquity...

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