Standard Basque and Its Dialects

Koldo Zuazo, Gregor Benton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429770807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The origins of Basque dialects, a highly disputed area of research in Basque studies, are examined.

The author, the foremost expert on Basque dialects, traces their emergence to medieval times, using: a) the profusion of features common to all dialects: b) the large number of innovations common to all dialects; and c) the fact that the only truly divergent dialects are the western and Souletin ones. In contrast, the three central dialects differ in far fewer and less important respects.

The main contribution of Standard Basque and Its Dialects to the scholarly debate about the formation of Basque is that it identifies the nuclei from which the current dialects almost certainly emerged. The book explains the points of view that Basque speakers have upheld concerning their dialects, the formation of provincial standards starting in the eighteenth century, and the launch of Standard Basque in the second half of the twentieth century.

1 Basque’s survival

The origin of Basque is a principal issue in Basque studies. Another, no less important issue, is why Basque has survived. Basque and its precursors managed to stay alive despite pressure from Indo-European languages, Latin, and the dialects that emerged from Latin, including Occitan, Navarrese Romance (a variety of Navarro-Aragonese, now extinct), French, and Castilian.

That Basque survived these assaults is a cause for rejoicing – on the part of its speakers, who have defended it so tenaciously, and of all humanity, for whom Basque is part of a universal linguistic heritage and provides unique evidence of the nature and structure of language.

Basque has persisted despite geographic shrinkage, social marginalisation (both now and in the past), profound changes in its internal structure, and extreme dialectal fragmentation, as I go on to show.

Geographic shrinkage

We know little or nothing about the geographic extent of Basque in antiquity. We can only hazard some guesses about the situation at the time when the Roman Empire established a hold on the region, 200 years before the beginning of the common era. In those days, Basque seems to have occupied a broad stretch of territory in the southwest of what is now France. It coincided, more or less, with the course of the Garonne river, which originates in the Aran Valley (Val d’Aran), in the Catalan province of Lleida, and meets the sea north of Bordeaux. This Basque-speaking territory therefore corresponded to what until 2016 was the French administrative region of Aquitaine. Epigraphs found in the region, written in Latin in the first to third centuries, contain the names of people and divinities that are in many cases structurally similar or identical to present-day Basque (see Gorrochategui 1984, 1995).

To the south, the territory where Basque was spoken probably extended to regions that are today part of the provinces of Burgos, La Rioja, Soria, Zaragoza, and Huesca in the Spanish state. Toponymic evidence suggests that Basque was almost certainly spoken in places close to the Pyrenees, on both the French and the Spanish side, at least as far south as the Aran Valley.

We do not know when Basque was finally lost to these areas. In some places the loss must have happened during the period of Roman rule, but in others Basque survived much longer. We have only two pieces of evidence regarding areas in which Basque was spoken in the remote past. We know that in the first half of the thirteenth century, between 1234 and 1239, King Fernando iii of Castile conceded a fuero (a charter or code of laws) to the inhabitants of the Ojacastro Valley in La Rioja, allowing the use of Basque in courts. Here is a text regarding the event, in which Don Moriel, the Merino Mayor of Castile, and the Mayor of Ojacastro played leading roles (Merino Urrutia 1978: 18):

The mayor of Ojacastro, asked to bring in Don Morial who was Merino (Chief Law-Enforcement Officer) of Castile, so he would know that a man from Ojacastro had the right to reply in Basque if he was sued by another man from the town or from outside of the town. Thus Don Morial came to know that the inhabitants of Ojacastro had this fuero.¹

On the other hand, as José María Lacarra has shown (Irigarai 1974: 115), the municipal ordinances of Huesca in 1349 prohibited the use of Arabic, Hebrew, and Basque in the local market, suggesting that Basque was in fact used by traders in that northern Aragonese city:

Let no merchant be employed who does any trading, who buys or sells with anyone speaking in Arabic, or in Hebrew, or in Basque; and whoever does it, should pay 30 solidi as a fine.²

However, none of this evidence is definitive. In some cases, the Basque population might have expanded beyond its original territory in more recent times, by populating new areas or repopulating old ones, perhaps as a consequence of the expulsion of the Arabs.

Starting in the sixteenth century, more copious and reliable evidence is available, as I now go on to show.

Basque in the sixteenth century

It seems that by the sixteenth century the area in which Basque was spoken had shrunk into the seven Basque provinces of the present day: Lapurdi (Labourd in French), Lower Navarre, and Zuberoa (Soule in French) on French territory, and Araba (Álava in Spanish), Bizkaia (Biscay), Gipuzkoa, and Navarre on Spanish territory. These provinces were not entirely Basque-speaking. The western part of Bizkaia, to the west of Bilbao, and the southern territories of Araba and Navarre, used Romance (a generic name for languages derived from Latin), as did Baiona (Bayonne in French) and the surrounding area in Lapurdi. On the other hand, people in some border regions that were not administratively part of the Basque Country spoke Basque. Today, one example is Eskiula (Esquiule) in the former French province of Béarn.

There were also hybrid languages, or pidgins, based in part on Basque. One pidgin was a mixture of Icelandic and Basque, another of Basque and various aboriginal Canadian languages. The Basque coast was a veritable fishing and whaling power in earlier times, and Basque traders and seafarers were active far and wide.

In 1937, the Dutchman Nicolaas Deen published an extensive vocabulary of Basque-Icelandic Pidgin, including entire sentences in the language (Deen 1937). We know next to nothing about the Basque-Canadian pidgins, whose scant remnants have been recovered and researched by another Dutchman, Peter Bakker (1991). However, the existence of this pidgin is attested in various primary sources. For example, the Gipuzkoan chronicler and historian Esteban Garibai, in his Compendio historial, published in 1571 (Zubiaur 1990: 135–6), wrote:

Navigators of the province of Gipuzkoa, the dominion of Bizkaia, and the Basque lands [Lapurdi] went once a year to Newfoundland to fish for cod and hunt whales, and the savages of that region got to know their language, despite the brevity of their annual communication, which lasted less than two months.³

The French inquisitor Pierre Lancre (1553–1631), who ordered so many Basques to be burned at the stake, also collected testimony regarding the relations between fishers and traders from the Lapurdian coast with inhabitants of Canada (Lancre 1613 [2004]: 32–3):

They were delighted to find, even before they became familiar with those places, that the Basques were already trafficking there, even to the point that the Canadians negotiated with the French in no other language than that of the Basques.⁴

The Basque-speaking region starting in the sixteenth century

Starting in the sixteenth century, the Basque language suffered a never-ending series of setbacks, especially in Araba and Navarre. In the course of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Crown took measures against all languages other than Castilian. An example is the Nueva Planta decree of 1716, promulgated by Felipe V of Bourbon, which established Spanish as the only language of the courts of law and government, mostly at the expense of Catalan. In the nineteenth century, the Basque Country was ravaged by the Carlist wars of 1833–39 and 1872–76. The long years of military dictatorship following the Civil War of 1936–39, until the death of Franco in 1975, were similarly devastating, and brought Basque to the brink of extinction.

In 1973, a study appeared that quantified the total number of Basque speakers (Irizar 1973). Its author, Pedro Irizar, counted around 610,000 Basque speakers, of whom only 532000 lived in Basque-speaking areas. The rest were emigrants who had settled in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Pau, Bordeaux, various parts of the Americas, and other places. The number of speakers was shown to have fallen greatly, calling into question the language’s very continuity under the social conditions of the late twentieth century.

A closer look at the figures suggests that the situation was even worse than it appeared at first sight. For example, in Eibar, my place of birth, the number of Basque speakers was around 11,000, out of a total population of 37,073. One third of the population knew Basque, but only the older ones, above the age of 40–45, especially men, used it as a matter of routine in their daily lives. Younger people spoke above all in Castilian and used Basque only at home and when speaking to older people. In many families, the parents found it hard to speak Castilian, whereas the children were unable to construct a full sentence in Basque. Basque had attracted the stigma of a “rural language,” which did not help at a time when much of the Basque Country was beginning to industrialise. What was true of Eibar was also true of other urban nuclei in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, such as Tolosa, Beasain, Ordizia, Urretxu, Zumarraga, Legazpi, Oñati, Arrasate, Elgoibar, Durango, and Amorebieta.

Table 1.1 shows the distribution of Basque speakers by province in the early 1970s:

Table 1.1 Basque speakers by province

Province	Basque speakers
Gipuzkoa	276,843
Bizkaia	140,229
Lapurdi	39,530
Navarre	35,228
Lower Navarre	27,016
Zuberoa and Béarn	11,907
Araba	1,863
Total	532,616

The situation in Araba was particularly critical. Only 1,863 of its inhabitants were thought to know Basque, including residents in industrial centres such as Agurain (Salvatierra in Spanish), Araia, and the capital Vitoria-Gasteiz, who had moved there from neighbouring Basque provinces. Of the 1,863 Basque speakers in Araba, 1,432 lived in Aramaio, at the intersection of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, while the remaining 431were scattered across Zigoitia, Legutio, Baranbio, and Laudio, at the same intersection. In Araba as in the whole of the Basque Country, the disappearance of Basque seemed to be an imminent and irreversible fact of the post-war period.

Basque’s recovery

A few years before Pedro Irizar published his survey, in around 1960, the first symptoms became apparent of a change that, in the course of just a few years, produced surprising results. On the one hand, schools arose, the ikastolak, which functioned exclusively in Basque. At first, the classes were given in private houses, semi-clandestinely, but later they were able to use premises made available by the Church or other entities, and in time they were in a position to build or equip real schools.

The advent of these new centres of learning meant that the creation of a standard language could no longer be delayed, so that textbooks and other necessary materials could be prepared and distributed. The first sketch of the new norm was published in 1964, and, starting in 1968, the Academy of the Basque Language decided to intervene, against the opposition of many of its members.

In around 1965, the first centres for Basque adult education were set up: gau eskolak or night schools, which later acquired the name euskaltegi or centres of Basque schooling. Thanks to these centres, people from outside the Basque Country or Basques whose parents had not transmitted the language to them could learn it, or at least acquire a certain level of linguistic competence.

Apart from these three important achievements, the creation of schools for children and adults and the elaboration of standard Basque, the language made a few small breakthroughs in communications media (radio and magazines), under the tutelage and control of the Church. In the literary field, another important change was brought about: Basque made the transition from a predominantly rural literature depicting or interpreting local everyday life, mannerisms, and customs (literatura costumbrista) to a literature more in accord with the new reality of the Basque Country, predominantly urban and industrial. Popular music also underw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Basque’s survival
• 2. Origin of the dialects
• 3. Centres of innovation
• 4. Basque ideas about the dialects and attitudes towards them
• 5. Literary dialects
• 6. The standardisation of Basque
• Glossary
• Index