Lingthusiasm Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez
Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who's an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who'd learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn't alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for "unicorn language users", aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.)
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We appreciate your support so much, and it was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. If you'd like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 Listener Survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023. In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about giving advice by answering your linguistics questions! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez's website
Basque at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign blog (posts in Basque and English)
'Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward' by Evelina Leivada, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez3, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, and Sílvia Perpiñán
Basque music recommendations from Itxaso:
Berri Txarrak 'Libre' on YouTube. This band, mentioned by Itxaso in the episode, was huge in the 90s and 2000s. This song was a big hit, and it is very philosophical about topics also related to Basque politics. This one discusses 'Freedom'.
Su Ta Gar 'Mari' on YouTube. This band was huge during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and key to the revitalization processes - at least for the younger generation that wanted to see themselves as young 'rebels'.
Gatibu 'Aske Maitte' on YouTube. This band is from Gernika, they became active in 2000s and are one of the leading bands in Basque Country today. Their topics continued with the general theme of freedom, but also tackle lots of issues of feminism in a softer rock way.
Zetak 'Hitzeman' on YouTube. The band has become a biiiig hit in the Basque Country in the past few years. Super romantic and fun.
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
