Every year an organisation brings together 120 or so Basque speaking teenagers between the ages of 16-17 from all over Euskal Herria and the world in the Basque diaspora.
This group of disparate youths from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different likes and dislikes, will walk across the length and breadth of the Basque Country, in order to know first hand its nature, its people, its history, its culture and its language.
The path that EuskarAbentura takes is from Maule in Zuberoa to Getxo in Bizkaia. They will have travelled by the end almost 800km following different parts of the Camino de Santiago. But it's not just about walking: activities, workshops, trips and talks are prepared throughout their entire journey with the help of volunteers, town halls, musicians, museums, farms, bertsolaris, schools...
The Basque organisers were inspired by a similar initiative that they themselves took part in as youth, the Quetzal trail. It was something I had no idea about and yet it looks like its positive effects on the participants were far reaching, decades afterwards.
It was apparently in Boise, Idaho (one of the centres of Basque diaspora in the Americas) , that the organisers of EuskarAbentura decided to create their initiative in 2018.
Here are their self proclamed goals:
Gazteen artean euskararen erabilera sustatu eta normalizatzea.
Gazte euskaldunen sare berri bat sortu eta elikatzea.
Euskal Herriko natura-ondasun eta ondasun historiko nahiz kulturalen transmisioa bermatzea.
To support and normalise the use of Basque among young people.
To create and feed a new network among young Basque speakers.
To strengthen the transmission of the natural and historical heritage of the Basque Country.
The second point is especially important because the hope is not to just have another 'summer camp' where you have fun and then go home. The problem is that youth, by virtue of growing up in their locality in a particular city or town, or even a particular neighbourhood, tend to get locked into a specific configuration of social networks. To put it simply, you have your friends from primary or high school and until you go to University, you're not likely to make new friends, certainly you might not get an opportunity to make new very different friends. And by the time you move out and branch out on your own, that's many crucial years where your language habits solidify.
This can be bad for Basque if the friends/neighbourhood/social circle that you're locked into while a teenager is a majority Spanish or French (or English) speaking one. If you're lucky to be born in a place where everyone speaks Basque, great, your social network reinforces your Basque. If you're unlucky to be born in a place where the dominant language is Spanish or French, how do you make a new Basque social network?
EuskarAbentura hopes to create lasting change in this regard. Where else could a Basque kid from Argentina meet a Basque kid from Iparralde and walk hand in hand, sleep, eat and laugh together for 800 km...in Basque? Who knows where that friendship will take them and how many years it will last?
As for their first goal, to strengthen the use of Basque, they measure the results. The initiative acts as a giant sociolinguistic experiment, why not take advantage? In the 2019 expedition, it was observed that the language used in the conversations between the teens was an average of 83% in Basque.
As the expedition went on, the usage of Basque went up among the youth, that is to say the teens spoke more and more Basque to each other, and even after the initiative finished, six months later they found that in a follow up of the teens' language habits, their Basque usage remained higher.
You can't expect miracles. When the kids go back home, the sociopolitical context remains unchained and you have to plunge back into a world of Spanish and French. But there was a noticeable increase in the teens' use of Basque in social media and their consumption of Basque media and content (music, books etc), especially in the case of kids from the North Basque Country.
For more information on the sociolinguistic implications of the 2019 EuskarAbentura, see this article.
The point of EuskarAbentura is not to teach Basque, the presumption is that they all know Basque already. The point is to actually bring Basque out of them, to make it the primary tool for communication. Horizontal learning, horizontal transmission, instead of the hierarchical structure of a school.
Other benefits from this mixing?
If you listen or read the participants' after reports, they often say how it was a good experience (for some of them the first time) to meet speakers of so many different Basque dialects. Literally 120 teenagers from every point of the Basque Country stuck together, imagine the linguistic melting pot!
Another point is that Basque speakers from areas where Basque is not widely spoken get like a psychic shock, because it might very well be the first time they realise that there are youth like them who live in Basque - from birth to death, from sunrise to sundown, 24 hours in a day, 7 days a week. Not only their Basque usage goes up, their unconscious or conscious conception of Basque changes too.
And don't imagine from the happy videos that all of the youth wanted to go. Many of the accounts from the teens say that their parents egged them on, or they were nervous or shy. Just ordinary kids. Not language activists. Watch the video and I dare you not to smile!
I walked most of the Caminos that they used, although I was walking alone. Definitely something I would like to do if I was still 16-17! By the way the 2020 EuskarAbentura has been cancelled due to coronavirus.