Cainntear wrote:The one is not exclusive of the other. Every language than has needed an active revival was being alienated before the revival. The question is whether the revival supports the existing speaker communities or further alienates them.
Does the Basque language revival alienate the existing speaker communities of Basque? Alienation in what sense?
Cainntear wrote:Nope. There are plenty of people who actively reject the idea that a "standard language" is a good idea. Scottish Gaelic was quite late in getting any "official" standardisation, and that was only a standardisation of orthography -- there was no attempt to mandate the teaching of any other elements of the language in a standardised way. There is no standard form of "thinking" for example, which can be "smaointinn", "smaoineachadh", "smaoineachainn" or even "smaoineachdainn", depending on where you go, but whichever one of them you use, you should spell it like one of the four in an exam.
A standard language was attempted ever since Basque first started to be written down, first regional standards and then interregional standards, which euskara batua is. The Navarro/Labourdin standard dialect is a standard, had (has) great popularity and was created by Basque speakers: what makes it any different from euskara batua? Let me point out that these regional standards still exist and have not been annihilated by euskara batua, the Basque language is composed of the various natural dialects, the new euskara batua dialect, the regional standard dialects.
Euskara batua was created by
native speakers of Basque and luckily for Basque it was done at a late state enough for it not to be too infected by romanticist nonsense (like Sabino Arani), but by proper linguists, most notably by Koldo Mitxelena. In the beginning there were serious discussions to simply base the standard on one regional standard (Guipuzkoa, the most prestigious at the time in the southern provinces), but euskara batua ended up being a mix of central regional standard dialects with contributions from other regionals standards. and if you fear it being too artificial, one of the most common criticisms of euskara batua is precisely that it is
too Guipuzkoan.
Let me state this again: euskara batua is a combination of OTHER standards.
Cainntear wrote:While Basque has fairly marked regional differences, it would be easier than many people think for different dialect speakers to learn each other.
A standard language isn't just a lingua franca meant for interdialectical communication, it is the language that one uses in education, government, media etc. In fact, as far as I can tell,
the Basque Language Academy never even envisaged the use of euskara batua as a spoken language, it was meant to be a written standard like every other standard before it, hence why it focused on standardising verb morphology, but left the phonology, intonation, stress (of which there is a dizzying variety) undefined, to be used as Basque speakers saw fit according to their native dialects. I still don't think they've touched on that in their latest grammars.
There are no Basque speakers, not old, not young, that I have talked to or have read about, who deny that there was a need for a standard. Indeed, the cry for a standard came from Basque people themselves in an urban setting, who wanted a language they could use there to fit in all aspects of daily life in heavily urbanised areas.
If we're going to talk about alienation, then prohibiting Basque people from creating a standard language because you yourself like the idea of no standard at all, well, that brings to mind serious issues, like: who are you to say that, as an outsider?
Furthermore, and this is what King is going on about, rural people who saved their language could not save their language beyond their home. It was materially impossible for them to do so. We have over several thousand years of history where the Basque language has undergone relentless retreat and by the 16th century already, Basque was on its way of disappearing from many provinces. By the time of the Francoist dictatorship, what
exactly do you think the rural people who held the natural dialects could do to reverse this plunge? In the post-Franco era, what
exactly do you think these rural people could have done to spread Basque language to all Basque people?
Why was it young, urban people who spearheaded the revitalisation? They were the only ones with the material wealth, the sheer numbers and political weight to do it, and the facts prove that their decision was the right one. If euskara batua had never been created, I have absolutely no doubt that the introduction of Basque as a medium of education in schools, in the media, in the universities, in the government, in the sciences etc, as a language of literature, would be FAR behind what it is now, and the language would be in far more peril than the already tenuous situation it is in now.
Not because the natural dialects couldn't do the job as well as euskara batua, because all linguistic varieties can end up doing anything, but because the
speakers who wanted to use euskara batua were the ones who are socio-economically well placed to actually do it.
Here is the bare bones fact: we have more speakers now. There is actually speaker population growth. That has not happened in decades, if not centuries.
By any measure, that is a good thing, even if Basque children coming from non-Basque speaking families end up being monodialectical.
In this respect, King is fundamentally correct. That does not mean that there cannot be a better rapprochement between urban and rural speakers and indeed this is what must be done. I already said that language activists need to work in close collaboration with the native speakers of the dialects. But that is debating about the HOW, not the what.
Finally, euskara batua in no way impedes the learning of the dialects. In fact, the Basque Language Academy carries out linguistic work on the dialects themselves, and they have publicly stated that the point is that euskara batua is complementary to the natural dialects, not a superior version, not meant to replace it. We see that in the anecdotes I posted, which is where native speakers of dialects end up learning both, and even their 'euskara batua' is heavily influenced by their substrate. Euskara batua doesn't actually exist in real life, beyond the new generations who have no family model to follow, and the media.
I have already state that even if euskara batua does not impede the learning of the dialects, it does not
encourage it either, and so I said the Basques should put more emphasis on that aspect. Let me reiterate, the natural dialects of Basque are under far more threat from Spanish or French than by the standard dialect. Rail against the standard dialect if you want, it is the bulwark against the Spanish and French languages.
And I'll repeat for the millionth time: a standard dialect does not need to threaten the natural dialects. I will always be a supporter of a standard dialect done RIGHT.
Cainntear wrote:Besides, when it comes down to the non-heritage speakers, the "standard" is often an excuse to ignore real language, particularly in phrases and manners of speech (as in the Hawai'ian cute/ugly baby thing). I have heard heritage speakers say that to understand kids coming out of Basque medium, they had to translate everything to Spanish in their heads word-for-word; there is a tendency for many non-heritage speakers to speak with Spanish idiom using Basque grammar and vocabulary, whereas true bilingual heritage speakers have almost completely independent systems for each language.
Now that is a
ridiculous argument.
The fact that language immersion in school is not always the one shot wonder tool is obvious. It is extremely difficult to extirpate the L1 from its influence in L2, but if you have looked at the prescriptive euskara batua as set out in grammars and textbooks, it does not allow for Spanish-lite with Basque words. Thus, if you have witnessed Spanish with Basque words, it is not a failure of
euskara batua but a failure of language teaching or language learning,
and the SAME THING would have occurred if a natural dialect had been used as a means of language immersion. I certainly hope you would not say that the standard French dialect is worthless because English learners in the USA often show deep influences from English in their French.
Yes, of course a native speaker is infinitely more skilled and apt with their language than a non native speaker. This is a truism. Should non native speakers not try to learn the language? You do realise that if a Spanish speaker tries to learn an euskalkia, they will also botch that up, and interpret/produce everything through the prism of their L1? Is that a fault of the natural dialect, or is that a 'fault' of the language learner?
The solution is not to not teach language, ever, the solution is to
improve language teaching.
I personally have had the exact opposite reaction, Basque native speakers telling me that the youth speak 'perfectly' but that they don't
use it. Which is the problem.
Another point I want to argue about is that you seem to have a far too rosy view of native speakers as the keepers of 'real' language, but this idea of the rural, isolated speakers as the repositories of the real language has been seriously criticised in linguistic literature. And a priori it simply doesn't hold: often it is the urban speakers who are the most puristic, excessively so (Sabino again was the worst case of this).
If the capital As were added by you to correct me, you needn't have bothered. Euskera and euskara are both accepted forms both in Spanish and in Basque (the second source you quoted uses euskEra) due to dialectal differences. I didn't learn more than a few words when I was living in Gipuzkoa, but I always pronounced it as "euskera" so that's the way I write it. I don't know the whys, wheres and whos of how I learned it that way, but given my ideological stance on standardisation vs dialects, I accept either as correct, and use the one I learned unapologetically.
No, it was added by the native speaker to correct ME. I wrote euskera, as I wrote the comment in Spanish.
It did cross my mind that you might think I was correcting you, but I was not willing to edit another person's post and replace the capital A with a lower case a, without their permission, so I hoped you would not get offended. Too bad, because you did get offended.