Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Vowel interaction in Labourdin Basque revisited: evidence from non-canonical Sources
- Date
- Monday 3 March 2025
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.02
Abstract
Doing historical sociolinguistics on the Basque language has often been considered unfeasible. This perception stems largely from the relative scarcity of written materials produced by members of the middle and lower social strata, as well as the lack of documentation regarding other factors such as gender and age. However, this rather discouraging view is now changing. On the one hand, new theoretical models and studies on the social history of Basque have emerged [Madariaga 2014; Zalbide, Joly & Gardner 2015; Monteano 2017]. On the other hand, recent discoveries have helped to fill gaps in the history of the language.
One such discovery is a collection of fifty letters written in Labourdin Basque, and sent to Canada in 1757. This correspondence, mostly exchanged between fishermen and their families, provides valuable insights into the dialect actually spoken in the former province of Labourd (France). Alongside the significance of recent findings, previously overlooked materials can also be exploited, such as the small Basque-Icelandic vocabularies from the seventeenth century. These consist of three short dictionaries and the remnants of a Basque-Icelandic pidgin, used by sailors of the time and recorded directly from their speech [Deen 1937]. While these materials have attracted some scholarly interest, have not been examined from a variationist perspective or in terms of the contrast between orality and written tradition.
In this talk I explore the attestation of two epenthetic processes in Labourdin Basque: (1) the insertion of a pre-palatal glide [ʝ] after i, as in berriac > berrijac ‘news’; and (2) the insertion of a labial fricative [β] after u, as in datatua > datatuba ‘dated’. These epenthetic phenomena occur frequently in both the Basque-Icelandic materials and the 1757 letters, whereas they are virtually unknown in the printed texts of the Labourdin dialect. The discrepancies between these speech-proximate sources and the printed tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus provide an alternative perspective on the evolution of Labourdin Basque. Beyond the present case study, the exploitation of non-canonical sources may help to illuminate 'blank spaces' in the history of Basque dialects across different historical periods.
References
Deen, N.G.H. 1937. Glossaria duo vasco-islandica. Amsterdam.
Madariaga, J. 2014. Lengua vasca y sociedad en los siglos XVII y XVIII. Bilbao: Royal Academy of the Basque Language.
Monteano, Peio. 2017. El iceberg navarro. Pamplona: Pamiela.
Zalbide, M., Joly, L. & Gardner, N. 2015. Euskararen historia soziala lantzeko eredu metodologikoa [A methodological framework to work on the social history of Basque]. Bilbao: Royal Academy of the Basque Language.