Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

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nooj
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Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby nooj » Sun Jan 29, 2023 1:52 pm

Even if you don't speak Basque, can you observe any kind of change in the speech between young and old Basque speakers, between generations?

I'm not asking about morphology, syntax erc, that'd be ridiculous to ask of a non-Basque speaker. Just how it sounds.

The speakers are from two neighbouring towns on each side of the border, Sara (North Basque Country) and Etxalar (South Basque Country).

Image

Etxalar:

Aimar Iparragirre-Zinkunegi - born 2001. At the time of recording 21 years old.
Gerardo Danborienas - born in 1949. At the time of recording, 70 years old.

Sara:

Maiena Uhart - born in 1995. At the time of recording, 27 years old.
Mixel Urbistondo - born in 1950, died in 2020 at the age of 70. At the time of recording, 65 years old.

According to the information I have received (I live in the area), I know that all are native speakers of the language, that is, they learned it at home and with friends, although the younger generations also learned through Basque at school (the older people only had education in Spanish or French). The only one I'm not sure about because I haven't been able to ask is Maiena Uhart, so I don't know if she's a native speaker (as opposed to having learned Basque in school), but I assume she is.

In both towns, they speak very similar varieties: in Etxalar, a town of around 800 people, 90% of whom are Basque speaking, they speak Upper Navarrese dialect, and in Sara, a town of around 2,500 people, (unknown number of Basque speakers today, in 2010 it was 58.8%), they speak a Navarro-Lapurdian dialect. On paper, they're very similar.



If the video doesn't show up, click here.

I'd like to ask people who have no or little experience with Basque, because I feel like I'm too involved in the matter to objectively say one way or another.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby tastyonions » Mon Jan 30, 2023 11:50 am

Something about the young guy's speech sounds "Spanish" to me. Other than that nothing stands out.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby nooj » Mon Jan 30, 2023 2:08 pm

And does the speech of the older gentleman from the same town (the one talking with the woman) sound Spanish to you too?
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby tastyonions » Mon Jan 30, 2023 3:49 pm

Maybe a little but definitely less so.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby David27 » Mon Jan 30, 2023 5:27 pm

To me the difference between the interviewer and the interviewees don’t sound remarkably different. Maybe the girl sounds the least ‘Spanish’ to me. In general, to my untrained ear, when listening to Basque I think it phonetically sounds like Castilian Spanish.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby nooj » Tue Jan 31, 2023 7:34 pm

tastyonions wrote:Maybe a little but definitely less so.


Interesting! Thanks for listening and commenting.

David27 wrote:To me the difference between the interviewer and the interviewees don’t sound remarkably different. Maybe the girl sounds the least ‘Spanish’ to me. In general, to my untrained ear, when listening to Basque I think it phonetically sounds like Castilian Spanish.


From 00.00 to 04:00, there are two interviewees (the youngins). From 4:00 to 7:00 there's one elderly interviewee with a female interviewer, and from 7:00 to the end of the video there's an elderly interviewee with a male interviewer. I assume you mean you're referring to the girl in between 0:00 and 4:00, Maiena.

My question isn't so much the difference between the interviewer and the interviewee (although that's interesting), but about between generations living in the same place and who speak the same dialect. For example, my question isn't whether this young woman Maiena speaks the least 'Spanish', but whether the Basque she speaks sounds any different from someone from her same town, but born in a different decade, that is Mixel, from 7:00 to 9:45.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby guyome » Tue Jan 31, 2023 8:17 pm

The younger speaker from Etxalar sounds very Spanish to my ears. More than the younger speaker from Sara sounds French, if that makes sense.
I would group the two older speakers together. In fact, at first I didn't watched the whole video and mistook the speaker from Sara for the one from Etxalar, and vice versa. It's only when I rewatched it in full that I understood the last speaker was the one from Sara.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby galaxyrocker » Tue Jan 31, 2023 9:42 pm

I'm not going to comment for various reasons, but I think this is a great idea. I might post some older examples of Irish and then some younger ones as well as urban speakers and see if people notice any major differences.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby nooj » Tue Jan 31, 2023 10:11 pm

guyome wrote:I would group the two older speakers together. In fact, at first I didn't watched the whole video and mistook the speaker from Sara for the one from Etxalar, and vice versa. It's only when I rewatched it in full that I understood the last speaker was the one from Sara.


A recent paper came out, whose results you might enjoy.

Estatuen arteko mugaren eragina Garazi ibarreko euskaran

The aim of this work is to measure the linguistic influence of the political border in Basque. For that purpose, we have analysed the dialect of Garazi valley, because the border between Spain and France divides this territory: the town Luzaide is in the Spanish State, and the rest of the towns are in the French State. We have considered the social variables Geography and Age, and 7 phonetical/phonological and morphological linguistic variables. Our hypothesis is that among the elders we have a linguistic continuum in both sides of the border. Nevertheless, the continuum is getting broken among the youngest people, because of the influence of French/Spanish and the supralocal varieties called Iparraldeko batua/ Hegoaldeko batua. Initial hypothesis has been proved. We have conduced semi-guided and free interviews that lasted one hour and a half or two hours with 48 informants. To analyse the data, we have carried out the Mixed Logistic Regression statistical analysis with R program.


What this linguist did is run a super cool experiment. He recorded elderly Basque female speakers from towns that were located in the same valley but on different sides of the political border. For example, he recorded people from Luzaide (Spain) and Gamarte-Ainhize (France), which are both in the Garazi valley.

Image

Then he played the recordings to people from each town, without telling them where the recorded speakers were from (obviously). He asked them to identify where they thought the speaker was from, and if not from the same town, how far away from their own town. The hypothesis being that:

1) the elderly speakers on both sides of the border would either confuse the speech of the other side with their own (= it's what I speak), or would place the speech of the recording close to their own village, as they more readily identify the Basque of their neighbours with their own Basque.

2) he hypothesised that young people on both sides of the border would locate the Basque of the recording further away from their own town than the elderly speakers. The younger the person, the further away.

The results?

1) First hypothesis is confirmed. The elderly speakers identify the Basque speaker in the recording as coming from their very own town (when in reality, the speaker of the recording actually comes from across the border), or at the very least they assume that this speaker comes from a town very close to their own, i.e. ah, this lady doesn't speak exactly like me, but she speaks so similarly to me that she must come from the town next door (on my side of the border).

2) Second hypothesis is kind of confirmed and not confirmed. In general, there are more young people from both sides of the border who place the Basque that they hear from the elderly woman, further away from their own town than the older people did. Whereas all the elderly people mistakenly identify the Basque from across the border as either their own or from a town very close by, there is a non-insignificant amount of young people who identify that Basque not as their own, and instead 'correctly' identify it as some kind of Basque further away.

This confusion seems to affect young North Basques more than South Basques. When young people from Luzaide (Spain) heard a recording from the elderly woman from Gamarte (France), 75% mistakenly identified her as a person from Luzaide, their own town, and 25% identified her as coming from Donibane Garazi on the other side of the border, which is, all things being considered, still in the same valley.

However, when young people from the other side, from North Basque towns like Irulegi, Anhauze, Ezterenzubi, Hergarai, Gamarte and Ainhize (all on the French side) heard a recording from the elderly woman from Luzaide (Spain), 45% identified her as coming from Luzaide...now this is the correct answer, but it's not the answer that their North Basque elders gave, 100% of whom misidentified the elderly woman's Basque as coming from Garazi or from some other town in the same valley. In other words, 45% of the young people identified the Luzaide woman's speech as 'Basque spoken across the border by our dear neighbours in the town of Luzaide in Spain', whereas 100% of the older people assumed that the Luzaide woman was actually speaking their own Basque, the Basque they speak in their regional variety, in France.

Only 40% of the young North Basques mistakenly identified the speech as coming from their own Garazi region. A minority identified the speech as coming from even further away in different regions, like the Oztibarre-Amikuze region or even Hazparne, where they speak a noticeably different Basque. Which goes to show that for these few young speakers, the traditional kind of Basque spoken by their grandparents is becoming less and less familiar to them. And a couple of people gave an unexpected, disqualifying answer: they knew the speaker and recognised her voice! Goes to show how small the Basque Country is.

The study is actually even cooler than this, because he runs the experiment with middle-aged people and he introduces the standard language, which has two supralocal variations, one Basque standard for the North, and one Basque standard for the South. He hypothesises that the elderly Basques will place the standard Basque further away from their own town, whereas the young Basques will identify the speaker as someone closer to their town (or from the town itself). Anyway, you'll have to read it for yourself.
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Re: Does Basque sound different to you depending on the generation...?

Postby Axon » Wed Feb 01, 2023 12:54 am

This was interesting, because I care quite a bit about phonetic change in Mandarin over time and I'm always looking for the differences between the speech of younger people and older people (there are many, very clear to my ear). I figured I would be primed to hear details in the video that would mark language change.

Instead I didn't, not at all. Every speaker in the video sounded to my brain like the variation between their voices could have just been due to individual style. Nothing seemed more or less influenced by the rhythms of Spanish or French to me. I understand as much Basque as Irish, and videos of older people speaking Irish have a much more obvious generational gap in phonology in my opinion.
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