i'd love to know more about hitano - through 3 years of study i never learned about it! my teacher would mark hik/n on the board and tell us we didn't need to know it. is it super rarely used, or a dialect thing?
Kaixo!!
It's... complex! I'll try to write an understandable answer.
We have 4 pronouns to express "you" in Basque: zu (formal, standard one), hi (informal), xu (informal), and berori (very formal).
With these pronouns - except berori - a special verb system applies called allocutive agreement where the auxiliary verb wears the gender mark of the person you're talking to and not about, even if they're not the subject of what you're saying. Ie, if you're talking to a male, verbs will wear some suffixes, and another ones if you're talking to a female. Only 4 languages in the world have this unique system.
Historically, in the family, up to down, hi was used to speak to boys, and xu to girls. Down to up, xu for anybody with no gender discrimination. Among friends, male to male hi, female to female xu, male to female xu, female to male hi. In the areas where xu wasn't common, hi was used for everybody in your inner circle. It's complicated, I know.
But how does it work??
(standard Basque using non-allocutive zuka) Jon etorri da - Jon has come
(standard Basque using allocutive zuka) Jon etorri duzu
(said to a female using hitano / hika) Jon etorri dun
(said to a male using hitano / hika) Jon etorri duk
Aizu! - hey you! (standard Basque)
Aizan! - hey you! (hitano, to a female)
Aizak! - hey you! (hitano, to a male)
Seemingly, up until the 16th century just a few auxiliary verbs agreed with the gender of the person being spoken to, but from then on all the Basque paradigm of verbs can be agreed when using hitano.
Although a very rich and interesting system, in the 19th century Basque speakers started to consider it a sort of a tasteless way of speaking Euskara when compared to the much politer zuka. Especially when women used it, as they were percieved as low class. Hitano was very early lost among women, and men came later. I can guarantee you that veeery few people use it in the big cities of EH.
Today, although there are quite a few Basque-speaking towns where it's actively used and was never lost, it's not taught in euskaltegiak (Basque language centers) and ikastolak (Basque schools) because 1) you're perfectly fine using zuka with everybody and 2) verbs are usually a nightmare for new learners and adding their hitano versions is considered too much. To see how a verb can change: dizkiet -> zizkieat (to a m.) / zizkienat (to a f.); zaitut -> haut
In the last decade, though, different towns and cities have run initiatives to recover its use and there are proposals for hitano to be taught to new Basque speakers to save this linguistic oddity from oblivion ^_^.
I hope this post is not too difficult to understand, I did my best!
