Bla bla bla

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lingzz_langzz
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby lingzz_langzz » Fri Jan 13, 2023 10:24 am

Oh you've seen me on Twitter? How are you? Reveal yourself!! :lol:

I have contacted him on Instagram but as he doesn't follow me I am not sure he'll see the message but anyways I will wait.

And yes, Matinada Nissarda is a joke, honestly. I saw another video of them and for one minute of French there were literally seconds of some residual Nissart. I'm more less in peace with the fact that I'll have very few (not to say zero) opportunities to interact with Nissard in a spoken way but I'd still read everything I could find that was ever written in this dialect. Plus how the language evolved during its history is also something I would be interested in, althougt I believe this would be more available in French.

In any case, if you have anything that you consider is a must, or at least worth a read, I'd be happy to have a look at it!
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Re: Euskara (berriro)

Postby nooj » Sat Jan 21, 2023 10:37 pm

nooj wrote:I watched a pretty interesting documentary called Australia bihotzean, about the Basque diaspora in Australia. And accompanying the doco, you can also read a fascinating history of the Basque diaspora in Australia, in English: Australia: Vasconia and the lucky country.

I knew there were Basques in Australia, I met some of them in Sydney of course, but it was only until I came to the Basque Country that I heard tell of a community of Basques up in Queensland. But it was mentioned off hand and I filed that bit of information away. When I came to Lekeitio however I started hearing about Basques who lived in Australia and I met the guy who runs a pub here, Basque born and bred, but whose dad had lived in Australia for something like 15 years.

So the son has converted the pub into a place to watch Australian rugby matches, like yesterday morning when I went to watch the NZ and Australia match which NZ handily won. The pub was full of Lekeitio men cheering on Australia and I was like...what is going on here?

The documentary explains how mostly from the 50s onwards, Australians hired Basque workers to come work on their sugar cane plantations, to cut and burn and transport. This was hard work.

In fact, in the 19th century Australians had used virtual slave labour, Pacific Islander people that they hired (or kidnapped) to work on these farms, and at the beginning of the 20th century in accordance with the official White Australia Policy, they unceremoniously deported almost all of them in order to maintain Australia's "racial purity".

Well that policy needed modification post-WW II due to labour shortages. The White Australia Policy would be completely abolished in the early 70s, allowing non European immigrants to come, but first the doors were opened to non British European immigrants, like the Basques, Italians, Greeks etc.

In the post war immigration, there were two great sources of Basque immigrants. Some came from Bizkaia, from the area around Gernika including Lekeitio. Other Basques were recruited from Nafarroa. Several thousand Basques in total came to Australian towns to work and live. Unassuming town names like Innisfail, Ingham, Ayr hold a fascinating Basque history...they also came to the big Australian cities of Brisbane and Sydney too, some helping to build the Sydney Opera House!

Here's a frontoi in Trebonne where Basques would play pelota:

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Basque sugar cane cutters:

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One of the prominent people in the doco is Amaia Urberuaga Badiola, who was born in Australia but to parents from Lekeitio who came to work the sugarcane and stayed. At home she only spoke Basque. Amaia left Australia when she was 17 to see Europe, and went to the land of her parents, to Euskal Herria, Bilbo precisely. And she was surprised to see that no one spoke Basque in the street!

This was still 3 years before the fall of the dictatorship, but to give you an idea of how rare Basque was in Bilbo, people I talk to tell me that in the 70s and 80s if you heard someone speak Basque in the streets you would turn your head around, because the chances were high that it was a relative or someone you knew! Today Bilbo is still a bastion of Spanish but they say it's getting better...

Back to Amaia. It's truly bizarre to hear an Australian who speaks in the 'broad' Queensland accent to the Australians and in the next sentence speaks in the 'itxita (closed)' accent of Lekeitio to the Basques.

And she's not alone. In the documentary you meet quite a few Basques who were either born in Australia and moved to the Basque Country later, or were born in Australia and stayed there their entire life. In the doco they meet the mayor of Ingham, Ramon Jaio, speaks Basque. They actually put Basque subtitles when he speaks because logically he learned Basque from his parents and it was their dialect he learned, as a heritage language. Indeed it's doubtful he has ever read anything in Basque in his life.

Together with some linguistic adaptations to their Basque. The Basque baserria (farmstead) did not survive the transition to Australia, instead being called farma, instead of the denda, they would go to the xopa (shop)...

The host of the program is another son of the Basque diaspora, Julian Iantzi, but from a different and more well known destination for Basque immigrants: the USA. He was born in California, because his father who comes from Lesaka in Nafarroa went to work as a sheep herder/rancher in the 60s. For the documentary he helps organise an expedition of fifty Basques to Australia, some of the original immigrants and others family members. For some people it's been decades since they stepped on Australian soil.

After mechanisation in the 70s and given the improved economic situation in Spain, most of these Basques went back home and brought their children with them. Some of them fearing for the assimilation of their children into the Australian culture, and it's hard to argue with that. By this point, two or three generations after the initial Basque immigration, very few of the children of the Basques who stayed, still speak Basque. But most of these immigrants came never wanting to stay in Australia. They wanted to take advantage of the higher wages in Australia and even for the adventure. Back then families were large and sending off one or two brothers in a family of seven meant two less mouths to feed.

Even people who stayed for a relatively short period of time, only five or six years, express positive feelings and memories about Australia. It's kind of strange to be on the receiving side. To be looked at as foreign. To Europeans back then, Australia was seen as a land of economic opportunity, wide open spaces and open (perhaps too open) social and sexual mores.

On Friday I was bought multiple rounds of beer just for being an Australian. Imagine flying around the world in order to escape my Australian provincialism and falling into a Basque town that sent some of its sons and daughters to Australia?


I know this is old, but here's a short compilation of some clips I just made:



Also, I apologise for not regulary updating. I'm still here, no major health problems or anything. Just enjoying the mountains and life...and every time I get the urge to write about language (usually because I get angry at something), I start writing, get half way through and then my anger sputters out into a deep existential weariness, and I lose the motivation to finish my post. I need to somehow recover my foaming-at-the-mouth rage, that will give me the impetus to finish.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Mon Jan 23, 2023 12:36 am

One of the more cynical things that I saw from an official authority of France last year.

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Aside from the cheek of claiming that France 'supports the Basque language' - like the cord supports the hanging victim? - there's also the cheek of doing it so French, shortly after the special period of Euskaraldia whose very purpose is to promote the use of the Basque language in our daily lives, on the Day of the Basque language (December 3). Not even a customary 'hello' or 'goodbye' in Basque.

Tweeting 'happy Basque Language Day' and doing so in French is like making a poster that says 'happy vegetarianism day' but spelling the letters out with sausages and ham.

Here's a manifesto from 1949, that kicked off the idea of an international Day of the Basque language in the first place. Signed from Paris from Basque intellectuals:

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In the first paragraph, they give a diagnostic of Basque in the North Basque Country:

The Basque language is grieviously sick, if not on the verge of death. Every day it is going backwards. From the North to the South, throughout the seven Basque provinces, it is in dire straits. In Maule, the capital of Zuberoa, they no longer know Basque, and in Basabürüa, they are losing it as well. In Donapaleu, they are not any better, and in Donibane Lohizune, it's been a long time since we've heard any children speaking in Basque. It will not be long before we won't hear any Basque there at all.


The prophecy is not far off from being fulfilled.

Last year, we got some of the results of a 2021 sociolinguistic survey on the use of the Basque language. The results for the North Basque Country speak for themselves.

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Since 1997, the use of the Basque language in three North Basque provinces of Lapurdi, Nafarroa Beherea and Zuberoa has been in steady decline. In 1997, the use was 8.3%. In 2021, it has fallen by 3.6 points, to 4.9%. French is the overwhelmingly dominant language you will hear, at 86.1%.

To give a comparison, the survey say that Spanish is spoken in the North Basque Country at 7.2%, which is to say that today there's more people that regularly speak Spanish in the North Basque Country than Basque itself, which is astonishing. I suppose that they're Spanish immigrants from across the border (some of whom will be Spanish speaking Basques) or Latin American immigrants.

This, of course, is not to say that things are all roses in the South Basque Country either. The very same survey records that the most Basque speaking towns in the South Basque Country have seen their usage of Basque go down, which was enough to set Basque activists into panic mode (justly), as if even these small breathing spaces for the Basque language are slowly being snuffed out, then it's game over man, game over.

But what do you expect...? Already in 1896, the North Basque writer from Hazparne, Jean Hiriart-Urruti was warning about Basques switching to French en masse. But since then none of the underlying reasons behind the loss of the Basque language has been fundamentally addressed and redressed in the North Basque Country. It's madness to repeat the same actions and expect different results. French was the only language allowed for socio-economic promotion in the Basque Country and that is still the case today. In fact, even more so today than a hundred years ago, when it was still practically possible to live as an illiterate person who barely went to school and thus barely learned French, but could still make a living as a farmer, a fisherman, an artisan, a miner...today, even that bare minimum is impossible. Even if you wanted to scratch out a living at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder as a monolingual Basque speaker, they won't let you. They'll make you into a good French/Spanish speaker.

Gazteriak ere badauka oraino hein bat eskuara. Frantses hortan trebe dela erakutsiz geroz, nahiago du eskuaraz mintzatu gutartean hogoi, hogoita hamar urtetako gizon gazteak. Handik beheitikoak lerrakorrago dire frantses hortarat. Bainan haurrak? Haurrak asko tokitan osoki frantseserat eroriak dire. Ala frantses polita derabilate mihietan! Zer nahuzue ordean, uste badute jaunago direla eskualduntasuna utzirik franximan bilakatuz?


The youth still speak Basque to some extent. Although they show that they speak that French language well, 20-30 year old men prefer to speak Basque among ourselves, whereas those who are younger than them slip further into speaking that French language. But the children? Children in many places have fallen into speaking French completely. Ay, what beautiful French they speak! But what do you think will happen, if they believe that they are being more lordly by abandoning their Basqueness and becoming frogs?

Ala frantses polita derabilate mihietan! - Ay, what beautiful French they speak! To be read with much sarcasm.
franximan - a derogatory term for French people or French speaking people.

And in 1897 he wrote:

Galtzen dugu eskuara, edo galtzerat uzten guhaurek eskualdunek. Arrotza orotaz emeki-emeki nausitzen ari zauku. Eskualduna ez da gehiago ez bere lurren, ez bere haurren ez eta ere askotan bere buruaren jabe Eskual Herrian. Gure bideak, etxeak, bazterrak oro bizardun, kaxketadun... nork daki nor, eta zer, eta nondik huna jin batzuez beteak ditugu. Urrats bat ez dezakegu egin Donibane-Ziburuko itsas hegitik Santa-Garaziko mendi-zokoetaraino, jaun eta andre franximant zenbaitekin buruz-burutu gabe.


We are losing our Basque...or we are letting it be lost, we ourselves. The foreigner is slowly imposing themselves upon us everywhere.The Basque speaker is no longer the owner of their lands, their children, often no longer the owner of themselves in the Basque Country. All our roads, our houses, our lands, everywhere...you have moustached gentlemen, the gendarmerie. They're full of people, God knows who and where they come from. You can't take a step, from the coast in Donibane Lohizune (Saint-Jean-de-Luz) and Ziburu (Ciboure) all the way to the mountains of Santa-Garazi (Sainte-Engrâce) without running into French messieurs and madames.

Francisation and Spanishisation was of course nothing new. By the 19th century, French and Spanish had been made into the principal languages of socioeconomic upwards movement, and thus been made into the languages of the elite of the Basque society for several centuries beforehand. What was fundamentally different from the 19th century onwards is that the middle class and the lower classes were also invited - or obligated - into doing the same. As the North Basque writer Pierre Broussain from Hazparne wrote in 1913 to an Austrian anthropologist Rudolf Trebitsch:

Vienako jaun batek galdeinik, gootik erraiten tut zonbeit hitz Azparneko eskuara garbiz. Eskuara aiphatzen duanaz geoz enitake eon erran gaa galtzeko irriskuan dela, Espainiako Eskualherrietan beeziki. Nafarroan eta Bizkaian lehen eskuaraz mintzo ziin herri anhitz oai españolez mintzo dia. Frantziako Eskualherrietan nahiz gue mintzaia zaharra oai artio aski azkar den halee zonbeit lekutan galtzen aai da, hala nola Endaian, Donibane-Ziburun, Donapaleun eta Maulen. Hiri horiitan badia haur frango, aitamak eskualdunak tiuztenak eta eskuara eztakitenak. Gue arbasuen mintzaia eskoletan iakats balezate, elitake holakooik gerta. Eskoletan eskuara ikasiz gue haurrek amodio gehioo balukete been aitamen mintzaiaandako eta been burüak ohora litzazkete gue arbasuak bezala mintzatuz. Eskolaz kanpo badia ene arabera bi gauza eskuara gal aazten dutenak, lehenik jende handien etsanplua eta geo gue mintzaiaan pobrezia. Jende xehia beti jende handiaai jarraikitzen zako ala beztitzeko maneran, ala mintzatzeko maneran. Eskualherriko jende handiek miiku, aphez, notari, abokat, aspaldian eskuara utzi'ute frantsesez edo españolez artzeko eta hek bezala iteko jende xehiak ee ai dia frantsesez edo espariolez mintzatzen, ahal dutenian. Oxtian erran dut gue mintzaia pobria dela. Ezta estonatzeko zeen eta oai diila mila urthe bezala eona bita batee abaastu gabe. Alta baa biziki errex litake eskuarai emaitia eskas ditiin hitz guziak. Hitz berriak aise in ditazke, erruak eskuaran berian hartuz frantsesaai eta españolai batee maileatu gabe.


At the request of a gentleman from Vienna, I will gladly say some words in the pure Basque of Hazparne. When I speak about Basque, I cannot refrain from mentioning that it is at risk of being lost, especially in the Spanish Basque Country. Many towns that once spoke Basque in Nafarroa and Bizkaia now speak in Spanish. In the French Basque Country, although our old tongue had been quite vigorous up until now, it is being lost in some areas, such as Hendaia, Donibane Lohizune, Ziburu, Donapaleu and Maule. In these towns, there are many children who have Basque parents, but who do not know Basque. If they learned the language of our ancestors in school, this wouldn't happen. If they could learn Basque at school, our children would have greater love for their parents' language, and they would honour themselves by speaking like our forefathers. Outside of school, in my opinion, there are two things that are provoking the loss of Basque, the first is the example of the upper-class people, and the second is the poverty of our language. Humble people always follow upper-class people, whether that be in the way they dress or the way they speak. The upper class people of the Basque Country: doctors, priests, notaries, lawyers, have abandonned the Basque language a long time ago in order to take up French or Spanish, and the common folk speak French or Spanish as well to be like them, as best they can. I said just now that our language is poor. It's not surprising given that it's subsisted like it is without being enriched for a thousand years. However it would be very easy to gift our Basque the words that it lacks. You can easily make new words by taking the roots from Basque itself, without borrowing from French or Spanish.


He pinpointed the problem. The language shift was happening before the eyes and ears of North Basque intellectuals already in the late 19th and early 20th century. In all of the aforementioned quotes, one of the towns that is continuously taken as symptomatic of how the Basque language is being lost is Donapaleu (F: Saint-Palais), the central town for the Baxe Nafarroan region of Amikuze (F: Mixe), which has a total of 32 towns. When I say that it's the main town, you have to forget all about grand cities of hundreds of thousands of people. In 2023, Donapaleu 'only' has 2000 inhabitants, which goes to show you just how sparsely populated Baxe Nafarroa is, but this humble town was once the capital of the Kingdom of Navarre!

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After the conquest of Navarra by the Castillians in 1521, Henry II moved his capital, states general, chancellerie etc to Donapaleu, and it was from there that the Navarran kingdom was ruled until 1620, when via the Pau Edict, Louis XIII incorporated Nafarroa into the French Crown. Everything was then moved to Pau. You can take for granted that at that early date in the 17th century, French had already made its way into the elite, but you can also be sure that French had virtually no influence on the common folk in the region of Amikuze.

How do we know this? We have a valuable indication of just how Basque speaking the region was because of the work of a Basque linguist Pedro Irizar who surveyed this region in the early 1970s, using local informants to draft the number of Basque speakers in each town. Given that the towns were so small, this was feasible. In the first column, the name of the town. In the second, the number of total inhabitants. In the third, the number of Basque speakers. In the fourth, the percentage of Basque speakers vis-à-vis the number of total inhabitants.

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As you can see, even in 1972, the near totality of the towns of Amikuze were Basque speaking, except for Donapaleu, where we see a dramatic difference between it and the rest of the towns. It had already been very Frenchified, although 58.8% is still more than respectable. However, the Basque writers from the turn of the century were not wrong either. What's happening is that these numbers were unfortunately masking a situation that was very fragile. If you had turned up to any of these towns in 1972, you would find that the same sociolinguistic situation was taking place there as everywhere else. The majority of the Basque speakers would be middle-aged or elderly, and they would have already stopped speaking Basque to their children. What we're seeing in this survey is not the glory days of Basque language as the dominant language, but the tail end of its glory days. Most of the younger generations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s etc...would not be capable of speaking Basque.

We have no sociolinguistic survey that is comparably detailed on the current state of affairs in Amikuze, but the linguists that I've consulted state that Basque in Amikuze is well on its way to dying, with almost all children raised exclusively in French.

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According to a 2016 study by the Amikuze local association Zabalik (the name means 'wide'), in 2015 only 9% of children in the entire region were currently being schooled in a Basque immersion model of education, which is the equivalent of the D model in the South Basque Country. Let me repeat, this is the only model proven to produce bilingual speakers (at least some of the time). That's 75 children in total. 40% of children in Amikuze take the equivalent of the B model of education, where there is - theoretically - equal parity of hours given to both Basque and French, but the majority of them abandon this model as soon as they're out of primary education, in part because they're not given the option to continue. Indeed, some towns lack any kind of Basque education altogether, whether the immersion model (D model) or the 'bilingual' model (B model). These are the offending towns: Arberatze, Arboti, Arüe, Behaskane, Etxarri, Domintxine, Mehaine, Mithiriña and Ozeraine. The rest - 52% - have either no contact with Basque at all, or Basque is offered as an optional subject.

The Zabalik association explains what this panorama means for the Basque language in Amikuze:

Urjentzia egoeran gaude datu hauek ikusten ditugunean. Ondoko urteetan B eredua ez bada orokortzen, eta D eredua kopuru handiagoetara heltzen, jakinki belaunaldi euskaldunenak desagertzen doazela pirripitaka ondoko hamarkadan, lanak izanen ditugu sinesteko oraino Euskal herrian gaudela hemen gaindi.


We are in a situation of emergency. In the following years, if we do not generalise the B model, and if we do not increase the number of D model schools, knowing full well that the most Basque speaking generations are fast disappearing in the next decade, it will be difficult for us to still believe that we are indeed living in a Country that is really Basque.

In such a desperate situation, it seems like a particularly cruel joke for France to take a Basque initiative meant to encourage the use of the Basque language (Euskaraldia), on a day meant to celebrate the Basque language (the international Day of the Basque Language), and use this opportunity to claim that France supports the Basque language. Cultural appropriation is probably the term that best describes it.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Jan 31, 2023 8:49 pm

Piggy backing from a thread I posted here.

The last person who is interviewed in that video, from Sara, Mixel says something very interesting things about the arrival of the French speaking foreigners in numbers sufficient to change the housing prices and thus the language demographics in the Basque Country, although of course, it is a complex topic that involves a number of factors.

Orduan, hire ustez, frantses sartzearen arrazoi da kanpoko jendea honat etortzea.

Bai, eta maleruski, arrazoi haundiena, maleruski, euskaldunek saltzea. Hobenduna, lurra eta etxea saltzen duena duk. Ez erosten duena, eh. Saltzen duena. Saltzen duenak, egin dik pikardia...malura.


So in your opinion, the reason why French has entered Sara is because people from outside have come here?

Yes, and unfortunately the biggest reason is that Basques themselves have sold (houses). The one who is guilty is the one who sells their land and house. Not the one who buys it. The seller has committed a betrayal...something ruin. It's the seller.


It risks falling into simplification to say that the main reason for housing problems in the Basque Country is that of locals themselves who should have jealously guarded where they live and only sold to locals, even if that meant selling it at lower prices. It would admitedly have been (and could still be) quite an effective way to block off access to outsiders.

That said, in situations of minorisation, between two attitudes of victimisation (it's the other's fault!) and self-blame (it's my fault), the latter is probably more useful, since if you have dug yourself into a hole, presumably that also means you can also dig yourself out of it, and thus self-blame might be self-empowering so long as it doesn't develop into self-flagellation.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Sun Mar 12, 2023 9:37 pm

I'm still alive. Living my best life.

I just wanted to highlight this thing that a person brought to my attention. It's a caretaker who's looking after an elderly woman. And she (the elderly woman) wants to speak in Basque, it brings her happiness, so she teaches the woman who's looking after her some basic words...and the caretaker wants to make her smile, to let her know to not give up, to keep fighting, because her morale is low and as she says, she can see her charge's life draining away. I find it so desperately sad. An old woman living out her final days...and one of the things that brings a smile to her face is being able to speak her language. But the caretaker doesn't know Basque.

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It's not her fault for not knowing Basque. But man, there should be Basque speaking nurses and caretakers. They should be trained. And for those who don't know Basque, they should be granted the opportunity and the resources to learn it. That is at least what's frequently done in the South Basque Country. Nurses should not have to ask these questions, these translation questions, on goddamn Facebook. Basque should be an official language in the North Basque Country. Heck, what am I saying, it should not be 'an' official language, it should be THE official language.

I hate it so much. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Apr 18, 2023 12:02 am

Look, I'm not updating much here, but that doesn't mean I'm not doing things with my languages. In fact, I would say that I'm using my time even more productively, which is probably why I'm not posting things.

I went to Zuberoa (again) during the Easter holidays. As you know, I'm a mountain freak and so I went there with my backpack, tent, sleeping bag etc. I used this book:

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Written by the Zuberoan mountaineer Robert Larrandaburu, usually called by his nickname 'Pipas' (as people are wont to do in the Basque Country, if you get a nickname, it sticks), the book details 59 hiking routes throughout Zuberoa. The recently deceased Zuberoan Allande Sokarros, who also a great mountain lover, albeit not on the professionel level of Pipas, collaborated on the book, updating and correcting the Basque orthography of the mountains, landmarks, town names etc. In fact, his work is hopefully going to be used postmortem to correct the IGN (l'Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière) names that figure on maps and other such reference works, which are fundamental for GPS. These names are currently only in French, and at the best of times are deformed versions of the original Basque names.

I know this because I ran into Robert quite unexpectedly on one of those mountains. He works as a mountain guide, and when he's not climbing mountains in Morocco or in Nepal, he's home in the Basque Country. Well, one day out of the fog on a mountain top, he just appeared in front of me. What are the chances? Well, that's the funny thing about Zuberoa, the smallest and least populated of the Basque Country's provinces. It has a population of 14,000 and decreasing. In just the two weeks of my holiday, it feels like I met most of the Zuberoans that I'd heard of on radio, or seen before on TV. Not because I was stalking them or anything, but just because the place is so small, it's actually hard not to run into them. We exchanged numbers and I invited him for a coffee, and that's how I got his autograph on the book as well...

You can see him and his friend Allande Boutin in this television programme, called Txirrita, on France 3 Nouvelle-Aquitaine. Txirrita is the name of a famous South Basque bertsolari, I believe they named the programme after him.



The guidebook is meant for someone who has a car of course, as public transport is not exactly a thing in such rural areas, but I used the book to 'chain' the mountains together, so that I could climb one mountain and make it to another town on another day, and then the next day move to another town etc. In this way, I was able to visit areas that even people with cars would not visit, or have rare occasion to visit, which is the way I like it.

Among the places I visited was the very easternmost point of the Basque Country, the small town of Eskiula (population 536).

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I have to explain a little about Eskiula, because it's a curious place. It is administratively located in the neighbouring Bearn, but it is a traditionally Basque speaking town. Eskiula was founded in the mid-15th century via the initiative of a Basque noble family in Atharratze, who gave these lands, empty at the time, to Zuberoan farmers to settle there, specifically from the neighbouring town of Barkoxe, as you can see in the map below. And Basque has been spoken there ever since, in its Zuberoan variety, despite the political vagaries.

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It's important to keep in mind that although Basque had been spoken in Bearn and in other areas of the Pyrenees for a long, long time before being replaced by Romance languages (and we know this from Basque toponyms in Occitan, Aragonese and Catalan speaking areas), Eskiula is a very recent foundation and is no way indicative of the ancient distribution of Basque in Bearn.

I should also add that despite the predominance of Basque in Eskiula as the majority language, by virtue of its proximity with its neighbours and especially the city of Auloron e Senta Maria (= Oloron-Sainte-Marie), until the modern period, many Eskiulans spoke Occitan in its Bearnese variety as well, as they would use this language in their business dealings or market days. This was back in the day when French was still not a very important language for ordinary people in their day to day life.

You can have a faint echo of this bilingualism from an interview given to the Occitan politician and journalist David Grosclaude to the then mayor of Eskiula, Jean Berdo in 1990 for the television programme Viure al Pais.

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B: Before, the cattle traders were Bearnese. The inhabitants of Eskiula went to the market of Auloron, and they needed to speak Bearnese there. Now, the young people don't, they speak Basque. French, and Basque from time to time.
G: You say that those who know the two languages, or the three lnguages, alongside French, that they're people who are more than 50 years old...
B: Who are more than 50 and 60 years old.


And the mayor lets slip something that was already apparent at the time, which is that at the same time as Bearnese stopped being necessary as the lingua franca between Basques and Bearnese (as the Bearnese themselves stopped using the language), Basque itself was undergoing the same process in Eskiula. The intergenerational transmission in homes had been cut off in Eskiula just as surely as elsewhere. Today, the ever shrinking number of Basque speakers in Eskiula are elderly, and the majority of people under the age of say, 40-50 can't speak Basque.

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We have an exceptional case in Graxiana Castillon (1994, Eskiula), the youngest and possibly the last of her generation to be raised at home as a Basque speaker, i.e. the natural way. She had no choice, as there is no school in Eskiula that teaches in Basque. Everyone born after her, you can reasonably guess, has been raised in French by their parents at home, and even if they were to learn Basque later in life, it would be done through school or some other method.

Graxiana herself states that apart from her and her brother, she doesn't know anyone in the town of her age that speaks Basque. In the absence of embedding Vimeo videos, you can listen to her here: https://vimeo.com/578363371. She speaks very beautiful Basque.

Tristezia puntu bat ageri zaizu Eskiula aipatzean?

Eskiula Biarnorekiko mugan izanki, badira jende batzuk euskal kulturari lotuak baina beste batzuek batere ez. Errealitate hori, Euskal Herria osoan gertatzen da funtsean, baina egia da mugan izateak eragin handiagoa dakarrela alde anitzetarik.

Euskararekin ere gauza berdina erran daiteke, Eskiulan nire anaia eta biok gara euskaraz ari garen gazte bakarrak, gure adinekoetan ez da besterik, horrela da.

Euskara txikitan ikasi duzu ere?

Bai euskara etxean ikasi dut izan ere ikastola Eskiulatik urrun zen biziki, beraz Eskiulako frantses eskolara joan nintzen eta gero Oloroeko eskolara, Biarnorat, Eskuila mugan baita. Euskara txikitatik ikasi dut baina haurtzaroan izan da garai bat zeinean ez nuen euskaraz aritu nahi, "Moi pas de euskara" errepikatzen nuen egunero. Eskolan, ez nituen besteak ongi ulertzen frantsesez ari zirenean eta hutsune bat egon zen. Orduan frantsesa ikasten hasi nintzen eskolan eta horrek ekarri zuen luzaz hitzik ez nuela erraten euskaraz. Geroago berriz, ohartu nintzen euskara ments nuela, faltan botatzen nuela, bereziki nire anaia sortu zenean eta Xiberoan gaindi jende gehiago gurutzatze nuenean. Geroztik euskaraz ari gira beti etxean, familia guztiarekin.



I note a bit of sadness when you mention Eskiula?

Eskiula being on the border with Bearn, there are some people who are interested in the Basque culture, and others who aren't at all. That happens in the entire Basque Country, really, but being on the border has a greater influence in many aspects. With the language, you can say the same thing, in Eskiula, me and my brother are the only young people who speak in Basque, among people our age there's nothing, that's how it is.

Did you learn Basque when you were little?

Yes, I learned Basque at home, the ikastola was very far away from Eskiula, so I went to the French school in Eskiula, and later to the school in Auloron, Bearn, because Eskiula is on the border. I learned Basque when I was little, but there was a period in my childhood when I didn't want to speak in Basque, I used to repeat "Moi pas d'euskara' everyday. At school, I didn't understand the others very well when they were speaking in French, and there was a gap. So I started learning French at school, and this lead to me not speaking Basque for a long time. Then later I realised that I missed Basque, it was missing in my life, especially when my brother was born and I started meeting more people in Zuberoa. Since then, we always speak in Basque at home, with the whole family.


So, as I was saying, I went to Eskiula after hiking in from the neighbouring Zuberoan town of Barkoxe. I hardly ever take photos during my trips, certainly not of me, but here is a photo of some lamas on a farm...what's stranger than a Basque speaking town in Bearn? Lamas on a farm in a Basque speaking town in Bearn!

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I asked an elderly woman living in the neighbouring farm what all this was about, whether they were using the wool for something, but instead, she told me that the owner just uses them to maintain the fields nice and tidy. Oh, and this was all a conversation done in Zuberoan Basque.

And that's the problem...I estimate that she was over 70 years old living on her farm, and in the town itself I talked with two other Basque speaking people of her age. Granted, I didn't talk with a representative sample, but the youngest Basque speaker I spoke with in Eskiula was a man who I'd estimate to have been in his 50s.

Being administratively in Bearn, Eskiula doesn't have even the meager protection that a Zuberoan town would have for its language, such as the neighbouring town of Barkoxe. Barkoxe does not have an ikastola (= immersive education in Basque) but does have one pre-school which uses the so-called bilingual education model. Which is better than nothing. The kids, who number around 20, get some introduction to the language at least. The people in Eskiula don't even have that.

You don't have to take my word for it, you can read what Allande Sokarros himself wrote in 2002 (it's only gotten worse since then). He knew better than most the situation of Basque in every corner of Zuberoa:

Euskal kulturak bizirik dirauela ematen du Eskiulan. Alabaina, Ipar Euskal Herriko toki guztietan bezala, euskarak itzelki atzera egina dauka eta 35-40 urte baino gutxiagokoetan ez da inor euskaraz hitz egiten entzungo. Haatik, esperantza atxiki dezagun Eskiula, lehen izan zen bezala, euskaltasunaren bidean aitzindari egongo dela berriro.


It seems that Basque culture continues to survive in Eskiula. However, like in all places in the North Basque Country, Basque has significantly retroceded and among people under the age of 35-40, it's almost impossible to hear anyone speak Basque. Despite this, let's continue to hope that Eskiula, like it was before, will continue to be a pioneer in the path towards Basque culture.

As always, my trips to any town pass through the cementary. I look for linguistic stuff out of the ordinary. 50-60% of the time, the names, the inscriptions, the messages are in French. When they aren't, I pay more attention. Not that the messages and inscriptions written in French are any less important to their families, but most of them tend to be copies and mass produced, whereas the ones written in Basque - especially the ones written in the local dialect - are linguistically interesting because they have to be hand-made or purposely ordered. Take this tombstone, for example:

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It is written in the Zuberoan dialect of Basque:

Igarailia (iragailea = bidaiaria)
Ohartzite (ohar zaitez)
Gutzaz (gutaz)
Zure othoitzetan (zure otoitzetan)

Xiberuko xohardiaren orhoitzapenetan


Traveller
Remember
Us
In your prayers

In the memories of the Xiberuko Zohardi association (a Zuberoan dance organisation)


This word, zohardi that gave the name to the association is a specifically Zuberoan word for 'clear, cloudless night or sky'. I remember it clearly because when I was in the town of Urdatx/Santa Grazi, I was talking to an old man. I mentioned that I slept in the mountains and so far hadn't had any problems with the rain. I used the word oskarbi, which refers to the same thing (ortzi 'sky or sky god' + garbi 'clean'), and he stopped me there and told me that in the Zuberoan dialect, they say zohardi. This is a thing that I admire among some Basque speakers who are willing to share and teach words in their dialect, even in uncalled for situations or without being expressly asked for it. It's also true that while talking with Zuberoans, I purposely try to talk in Zuberoan dialect, so it may be that they think that if you're going to try to speak their dialect, you better try to do it as well as possible and are keen to invite you into their dialect.

Here is a picture of snowy Urdatx/Santa Grazi that I took:

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The only indication of Occitan I saw in the cementary was this one:

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Adichat(z) Jacques,
Les tripalhous


Goodbye Jacques,
Les tripalhous


Where I don't recognise the last word.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Apr 18, 2023 7:09 pm

I visited the small town of Etxebarre (population 74), where Allande Sokarros was born.

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I talked with his brother who still lives there and hiked to the peak of Zalhagaina, where his ashes were scattered and an inscription was left in his honour. From this vantage point, you see the most prominent and glorious sections of the Pyrenees in the Zuberoan part of the Basque Country. It's a good place to be laid to rest.

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Xiberoko bortüak hain maite zütüan gure lagünari


To our friend who so loved the mountains of Zuberoa

From the cementary of Etxebarre, the monument to the war dead:

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Jinkoak eman dezela zelia saritzat


May God grant them heaven as their recompense

Here is an example of the French naming of streets:

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In this instance, you have the Basque name first 'Zübüpeko bidea' and below, the French name 'Chemin de Zübüpea'. For someone who doesn't know Basque, the name is incomprehensible. Zübüpea doesn't mean anything. For someone who knows Basque, it's obvious. Zübü ('bridge') -pe ('under') -ko ('of') bidea ('road'). Zübüpeko bidea means nothing more or less than the road under the bridge.

Hundreds of thousands of French and Spanish speaking monolinguals live in the Basque Country without knowing about the toponyms of where they live. And, English speaking monolinguals as well. I met an elderly English couple who lived right there in Etxebarre...or rather, had bought a second home there 12 years ago and visited Etxebarre in the warmer months. They were lovely folks, but couldn't speak a word of Basque. They probably didn't know French either, but I didn't press them on it. 12 years after buying a house in a small Zuberoan village where the majority of their neighbours were Basque speakers. I can hardly think of something so strange. But to the hundreds of thousands of French, Spanish and English speakers living in the Basque Country, it's very normal to be deaf and dumb to the land where they live in.

It was near Zalhagaina that I waved down a truck, hoping to hitchhike. The person who stopped for me was not going in the direction that I wanted, but he didn't want to leave me empty-handed. He was from Barkoxe and a woodsmith by trade. He wanted to give me a walking stick he had carved. The wood is holly. I already had two metal poles for walking, I told him. "Enea bezalakoa ez düzü". Not like mine, you don't, he said and I couldn't say no.

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In fact, I'm very positive that this sturdy walking stick will outlast my thin aluminium ones...

I have hitchhiked many times throughout Zuberoa, and I don't know if it's my luck or if it's indicative of something, but the majority of the people who have stopped for me in Zuberoa are Basque speakers. I think it probably has something to do with the fact that Zuberoa is such a rural region and rural people seem to be more amenable to picking up hitchhikers.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Wed Apr 19, 2023 4:42 pm

I've repeated to the point of boredom that Galician-Portuguese used to...and continues to form a dialect continuum in Galicia and Portugal. Here's one rather prominent example, taken from a northern Portuguese TV channel, AltoMinhoTV, featuring a speaker from Melgaço (Castro Laboreiro) saying a phrase that reflects features of the traditional dialect of the area. In this video, she says "hey, what a beautiful shirt you have there, who made it for you?".

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but I've visited Castro Laboreiro as well before, stunning place! Go visit.



To make the comparison easier, I'll use the standard Portuguese translation that the TV itself provides in the title, followed by the actual phrase as spoken by the woman, followed by Galician:

Standard Portuguese: Que blusa bonita tens menina, quem a fez? If you were forced to, it is grammatically correct to say quem ta fez but European Portuguese speakers shy away from it (in this context).

What the woman actually says: Que chambra tam bonita tens, rapaza. Quem cha fezo? (vowel reduction makes it almost sound like quem cha fez, but the fezo is audible).

Galician: Que chambra/blusa tan bonita tes rapaza. Quen cha fixo?

The most important thing to note is not the lexical choices, but the morphological/morphosyntactical similarities. Namely, in Galician and in this traditional variety of northern Portuguese, you have the indirect clitic che, which can merge with direct object clitics to create things like cho, cha, chos, chas etc. Standard Portuguese does not have a distinction between che/te, it only has te.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Tue Apr 25, 2023 9:25 pm

Looking through some of my early posts is frankly embarassing, and should be embarassing to anyone who knows something about the languages that I dared to talk about. And I'm sure the posts that I continue to make will seem embarassing to me in several years time as well. I've thought about deleting some of them, but probably it's better to leave them up as a monument to the process of learning and to humble myself. But that's how it is...you try not to make too egregious mistakes, of course you inevitably end up making some outrageous mistakes...and you hopefully learn from them.

In other news, I've been rereading some of my post exchanges with Guyome from several years back about the Occitan movement. I accused the Occitan movement of being non-political to a fault. This is especially and most damningly the case for the early Occitan movement who were ideally situated at the turning point of the 19th-20th century. They lived through monumental socio-economic changes that would utterly transform the south of France...but did not capitalise nor engage with them. What was needed came much later, in the 1970s, with the politically conscious 'second wave' of Occitanism. And what goes for the Occitan movement also goes for the separatist movements (those people who think that Provençal and Gascon are separate languages from Occitan) as well, they haven't fared any better!

I'm going to post a short discussion that I read from a Gascon speaker (G) and a Basque speaker (B). The Basque speaker knows a bit of Gascon and is using it here with the Gascon speaker.

G: Perqué los aprenents deu gascon son hòrt mèi vielhs que no pas los de les autas lengos (basco, aragonés, berton, etc.)? Çò qu'am hèit (o n'am pas hèit) entad acò? Lo gascon ne seré pas sonqu'uua lengo de nostalgia? Qu'èi 41 ans e dens aqueras situacions dab aprenents, que sembli un mainat.

B: Benleu cal parlar mèi de futur que no pas de patrimòni?

G: Parlar d'avenir xèntz que sii hòrt realista que pòt paréixer ridicule tabei, ce'm sembla.Uua pista totun : que manca aus gascons un moviment artistic viu qui hèi víuer le lengo mèi naturaument. Qu'i a grops de musica mès ne son pas pro e que damòran en d'un marcat "de niche". Lo moviment reneixencista, dempuix los felibres, qu'a sustot jogat de cap a le literatura. Que seré estat mèi eficaç l'equivalent deu rock radical basco en gascon, haha.


G: Why are the learners of Gascon much older than the learners of other languages (Basque, Aragonese, Breton, etc)? What have we done, or what haven't we done, for this to be the case? Is Gascon just a language of nostalgia...? I'm 41 years old and yet when I'm with learners of Gascon, I seem like a child in comparison.

B: Maybe it's time to speak more about the future than about heritage?

G: To speak about the future without that future being very realistic can seem ridiculous as well, I think. Nevertheless, a hint of an answer: that we Gascons lack a vibrant artistic movement that makes the language more naturally alive. There are groups, but they're not enough, and they're relegated to a niche market. The Occitan Renaissance movement, since the time of the Félibrige, has turned to literature above else. It would have been more effective to have something like the equivalent of the Basque Radical Rock movement in Gascon.
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Re: Bla bla bla

Postby nooj » Mon May 15, 2023 10:51 pm

A short video from the University of Barcelona to motivate students to study introductory Aranese (A2 level). A mixture of 2 speakers from the Val d'Aran and one second language learner who here speaks in Catalan.



Occitan and Catalan are very closely related. By no means does this mean that knowing one will mean you will know the other. You do need some prior exposure or prior studying to enjoy your language transfer. That said, for a Catalan speaker, proper studying of Occitan will be fruitful within a couple of months even for the most far-flung and divergent varieties of Occitan.

Which brings me to my point, which is that given that Aranese has some 5,000 speakers - and I'm being generous - if we were to promote Aranese with even moderate measures outside of the Val d'Aran, such as offering this A2 course in all the public and private universities of Catalonia, that could have a noticeable impact on the Aranese number of speakers in a very short term.

A concerted effort to push its presence in the media such as TV shows in Aranese, funding for musicians, a regular presence of Aranese speakers with or without Catalan subtitles in talk shows, interviews, sport etc could have a significant impact on the number of Catalan speakers who understand Aranese.

And if you were to really take serious measures, like offering Aranese as an optional subject in some Catalan schools in areas where it was never traditionally spoken, starting with the localities closest to the Val d'Aran and with a programme to train more Aranese speaking teachers, you could strengthen its position. If you can get even 0.5% of the total population in Catalonia interested in Aranese by hook or crook (don't count out Spanish speaking Catalans also being interested in Aranese) you could multiply by 7.5 the current population of Aranese speakers.

And if this is true for Aranese, it is true also for other Occitan varieties.

I mentioned to an Occitan speaker that given the relative ease that Catalan speakers experience in learning Occitan, if the Catalan speaking countries were to really try to promote Occitan (and I don't necessarily mean through the education system), you could 'dope' the Occitan movement and this even without much effort from the part of governments.

As of this moment, the Catalan speakers who try to learn Occitan or Aranese are restricted to a relatively limited 'language nerd' circle whose number I can only speculate in the hundreds. But the Occitan speaker told me that it's possible that this limited number of Catalan adults speakers who are learning or learned some Occitan already rival the number of French adult speakers who are learning or learned Occitan in France. If this is true, although I don't know how you could reliably confirm it, it is a rather depressing reflection on the state of Occitan in France, as this is where the vast majority of Occitan speakers live and where ideally you'd expect thousands, tens of thousands of adults rushing to learn the language of their parents or grandparents in a place where there used to be more than 10 million Occitan speakers. But anyway...

The pool of potential Occitan learners is not limited to just the Principality of Catalonia, of course, although it is the place that has the most amount of Catalan speakers. There's even a small organisation of Occitan fans in Mallorca, who made this video to support the La Passem initiative in Occitania (the equivalent of the Korrika) back in 2018.



I want to mention a recent initiative that is exactly the kind of thing that I'd like much, much more of. And it's an 17 episode podcast about Occitania called País Invisible which is specifically directed to the Catalan speaking audience. When they have people over who talk in Occitan, which happens regularly, it is subtitled in Catalan.

For example, in the following episode (episode 13), they talk with a fascinating Catalan language activist, Mariona Miret who works for the Chambra d’Òc, an organisation dedicated to the promotion of the Occitan varieties of the Alps.



The presenters are journalists or people with some knowledge of Occitania, and it's purpose is to inform and entertain the Catalan speaking audience. Especially people who are interested in history, language, tourism, traditional music, cinema, and of course the Val d'Aran. This means that it's not directed to a general Catalan audience, but a rather socially conscious group. The main age group that is targeted, as you can read in its mission statement, is an audience between 28-50 years, but in fact, it seems to be directed to young people as well. The clean graphical presentation, the fact that they have professional editing, music, lighting, cameras etc means that it's quite attractive.

Here in episode 4, they talk with Paulina Kamakine, a Gascon poet.



Here in the last episode they talk about the traditional fire celebrations in the Val d'Aran to welcome in the summer season:



What I'd like next is something far more common and vulgar, something that is purposely made to introduce Occitan to a much, much wider Catalan speaking audience who know absolutely nothing about Occitan and Occitania. People more interested in sport, environmental issues, politics etc and who would otherwise never interest themselves in Occitan. Because it's easy (and necessary) to fish the easy fish to catch. But the circle of 'freaky language activists' is kind of small. There's a vast ocean out there of Catalan speakers who might also be interested and you wouldn't know unless you successfully sell Occitan to them.
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