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90 c h a p t e r f o u r Batua and Euskalki r e f i g u r i n g a n d r e a p p r o p r i at i n g t h e v e r n a c u l a r Crafted in the ferment of anti-Franco resistance, endorsed by radical nationalist writers as well as erudite linguists like Mitxelena who bore impeccable scholarly credentials, Batua managed to emerge from the controversies that originally surrounded it and elude being pigeonholed as the emblem of any particular political camp. It was adopted by Basque language schools and enthusiastically promoted by the grassroots adult language–education movement and early cultural magazines . As Bourdieu tells us, the rise and spread of official languages are processes closely linked to the rise of mass education and the economic and institutional structures of modern nation-states (1982: 42). In the case of Unified Basque, the institutional structures and statelike powers that the Basque Autonomous Community acquired after 1979, together with the growth of Basque medium education and the blossoming of Basque-language media, undeniably helped the spread and normalization of Batua, shaping the connotations it would have for speakers. When, in 1982, the newly created Basque government passed the Basque Normalization Law, which called for introducing Basque into public administration, public schooling, and media, Batua became the de facto official variety of written and formal spoken Basque in all of these arenas. The media have been especially important in establishing Unified Basque as the language of an emergent public sphere. Its adoption as the code of choice by the governmental-funded television and radio network eitb (Euskal Irrati Telebista) and later on by the first independent all–Basque–language newspaper, Euskaldunon Egunkaria, founded in 1990, further contributed to the production of a Basque public that was coming to recognize itself in and through a translocal variety of Euskara. The expanding institutional usage of Unified Basque diffused earlier accusations of linkages to radicalism and solidified the identification of Batua as legitimated national standard in a way more convincing than any pronouncement or debate ever could. As Batua was becoming a spoken as well as a written variety, its use provoked a range of reactions. I want to turn now from analyzing the public discourse among linguists and political activists about standardization to discuss some of the ways that the introduction of Batua affected the communicative economy of native Batua and “Euskalki”  91 Basque speakers of Usurbil, where I lived and did ethnographic research. I saw a notable difference between the way residents and local language advocates talked about and made use of vernacular and standard Basque in the nineties and the way they had responded to it in the early eighties when I had done my first fieldwork. A few incidents from life in Usurbil help to illustrate the shifting language dynamics in action and the more recent turn among language advocates to revalorize and find a place for vernacular Basque in the project of language revitalization. When I began research in 1982 and 1983, conversations about Batua were a part of everyday life in Usurbil. The first generations of children to attend Basque medium schools were getting all or part of their education in Batua. Hundreds of adults had some exposure to it from attending the low-cost Basque language and literacy classes offered in town. Youth looking for jobs in teaching or civil service were avidly studying Batua to obtain diplomas certifying their knowledge of Basque in the hopes of gaining an edge in a slim job market. Batua was on the new Basque television channel and in magazines and newspapers.1 It circulated in the world of native Basque speakers in this town as an emblem of a resistance movement and as a slew of new words and unfamiliar spellings in the newspapers or in the hard-to-read letters children brought home from their teachers. It also entered into the lives of local residents through the halting speech of the visiting anthropologist. Sitting in the kitchen of the Martín restaurant helping and talking with the women while they prepared the meals, washed dishes, attended to children , and dealt with the many suppliers who came in and out, I would occasionally ask a question about something someone had just said, a phrase or word I did not understand. The differences between the language I was learning and what...

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