Basque Intergenerational Transmission from a Language Socialisation Perspective

Abstract

Intergenerational transmission of Basque has been the focus of attention during the revitalization process that started 40 years ago, the learn-ing of the language by the young being a key factor of the process. Studies on intergenerational transmission in the Basque context have traditionally only looked at parent-child transmission within the family, a paradigm, as it is here argued, that is not sufficient to understand how transmission occurs in situations of minority language revitalization, where many families do not speak the language. The article proposes instead the suitability of the more holistic paradigm of language socialisation (Ochs & Schieffelin 1992; Schieffelin & Ochs 1986). By bringing to the fore the interrelated roles of the community and the education system, and, most importantly, the agency of children themselves, this paradigm questions the vertical, unidirectional, and mother tongue-based trans-mission model. Even if the suitability of the language socialszation model to understand language revitalization processes has been noted by ex-perts (cf. Duranti et al. 2012), it has hardly been used in the study of European minority languages, being Paula Kasares’ (2014, 2017, 2020) study of Basque intergenerational transmission in Navarre one of the very few. This article draws from this study, as well as from two other research projects: one on new speakers of Basque in the Basque Autonomous Community (Ortega et al. 2016) and another one on the attitudes of non-Basque speakers to Basque (Amorrortu et al. 2009). The theoretical re-conceptualization of intergenerational language transmission pre-sented in this article is hoped to be a contribution to other minority languages contexts.