Reclaiming Basque

Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism

Jacqueline Urla

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780874178807
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Basque language, Euskara, is one of Europe's most ancient tongues and a vital part of today's lively Basque culture. Reclaiming Basque examines the ideology, methods, and discourse of the Basque-language revitalization movement over the course of the past century and the way this effort has unfolded alongside the simultaneous Basque nationalist struggle for autonomy. Jacqueline Urla employs extensive long-term fieldwork, interviews, and close examination of a vast range of documents in several media to uncover the strategies that have been used to preserve and revive Euskara and the various controversies that have arisen among Basque-language advocates.

CHAPTER ONE

Language Loyalism's Early Roots

Advocacy on behalf of the Basque language has a long history that begins well before the Franco era and even before the appearance of a Basque nationalist movement. Recovering that legacy of advocacy and disseminating a fuller understanding of Euskara's past has been an important part of the contemporary language struggle. Exposés on early euskaltzaleak [Basque language loyalists] were common in Basque cultural magazines of the seventies and eighties. These early scholars and writers served as a pantheon of ancestors whose work is seen as having paved the way for present-day revival efforts.

To convey some of this history of Basque language advocacy, I focus on three discursive moments widely considered to be pivotal in the history of language loyalism. The first of these is the publication of a dictionary and grammar in defense of Basque in the eighteenth century by the Jesuit scholar Manuel de Larramendi. The second is the florescence of the Euskal Pizkundea, a Basque literary and folkloric revival, and the emergence of the first Basque nationalist party in the late nineteenth century. Although there are many important figures in Basque revival from this era, I consider two principal political figures who were greatly concerned with the Basque language: the writer and lawyer Arturo Campión and Sabino Arana de Goiri, the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party. While they had many profound disagreements over politics, Campión and Arana are exemplary of the kind of nostalgic ruralist view of Basque language and culture that prevailed in this period. The third discursive moment takes place in the early twentieth century with the foundation of the Eusko Ikaskuntza [The Basque Studies Society] and Euskaltzaindia [The Basque Language Academy] in 1918. Though the latter two institutions are often portrayed as a part of the same generalized florescence of Basque nationalism and cultural revival of which Campión and Arana are a part, I think it wise to consider them separately. I argue that something quite distinct and important in the approach to language emerges with these latter institutions. The largely progressive reformers of The Basque Studies Society define and legitimate a decidedly modern sociological perspective on language that laid the foundations for the discourse of “language planning” that was to come. In juxtaposing these three discursive moments, my aim is to show that within the verifiable longue durée of language loyalism, there are notable shifts in the way that loyalists understood the relationship between language and something we might call national identity.

Basque has been admired, defended, as well as attacked for a very long time, but not always in the same way or for the same reasons. A comparison of these different moments in language loyalism shows us that what we have is not so much a linear progression, but a set of somewhat discrepant conceptualizations that in many ways continue to circulate and bear upon the language movement today. In examining the discourse about language, I try to avoid some of the problems that often plague histories of language revival. One of these problems is the tendency to view the past as a continuous expression of loyalty to language that endures unchanged over time. My own view is that there are important shifts in what Basque meant to language loyalists of the past and what it means in the present. Equally problematic are what I would call “superstructural” explanations of language revival. In the latter, language tends to be treated mainly as a political symbol in the struggle for some other form of power. In these kinds of approaches, language revival is not seen as a real issue, but rather as a guise for the pursuit of class or regional ethnic-elite interests or both. The issue is not whether language politics intersects with other axes of power and interests. Of course they do, and we should explore those intersections. But language advocacy is not necessarily reducible to those other struggles. In my own reading of these historical moments and treatises I take a third way that seeks to gain insight into the shifting nature of language ideology and to identify underlying assumptions, tensions, as well as rationalities that may be at work in contemporary language revival.

Larramendi and the Antiquity of Basque

The first written accounts discussing the origins and antiquity of Basque, as best we know, began appearing as early as the sixteenth century, proposing—via rather fantastical etymologies—Basque as the origin for Castilian and Latin words. But it is in the eighteenth century, when the Spanish crown was attempting to centralize the state, that the question of Basque origins really heats up. It is at this time that we encounter a flurry of writings describing the origins and grammar of Basque along with a defense of its status vis-à-vis Castilian. The historical record reveals an impassioned polemic over the political status of Spain's regions and claims to Christian purity of blood in which language was a key terrain of battle and the dictionary and grammar book held pride of place. As historian Pierre Bidart writes, the dictionary in eighteenth-century Europe was “a veritable instrument of political and historical debate,” a means of “rendering of accounts, a manifesto, a counter-theory” (1986:328).

In Mitología e ideología sobre la lengua Vasca (1980), linguist Antonio Tovar situates the rise of eighteenth-century “apologias” [language defenses] on behalf of Basque as a reaction to the creation of the Royal Spanish Language Academy. This academy's exhaustive six-volume Diccionario de autoridades (1726-39) as well as the writings of Spanish philologists of the time, argues Tovar, portrayed Castilian as intrinsically superior to the other languages of the peninsula. Euskara—typically referred to at the time as vascuence or vizcaino—was by contrast characterized as a crude vernacular, limited by a faulty grammar and a mongrel vocabulary borrowed from the many peoples who had passed through the region (Bidart 1986). Basque was considered a barbarism. These views about Basque, and minority languages in general, continue to surface even today, supported in part by a long and impressive list of scholars (May 2001: 20). As Stephen May notes, one of our most infamous examples comes from John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century theorist of liberal democracy in whose 1862 treatise, “Consideration of Representative Government,” ethnic minorities are characterized as bearers of inferior cultures that stand in the way of a healthy nation-state. The following extract, which interestingly makes specific mention of Basques, is a particularly vivid example of how liberal political theory pits minority-language speakers in opposition to the democratic nation-state.

Experience proves it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people—to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity and prestige of French power, than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. (Mill 1861: 293, emphasis in original)¹

Among the most illustrious figures in the history of language loyalism is the eighteenth-century Jesuit priest Manuel de Larramendi, whose books challenged what he called the many “impertinences” and “calumnies” that were being perpetrated by Spanish philologists of the era (see Madariaga Orbea 2006). Larramendi offered his retort to their linguistic slandering with a cleverly entitled grammar, El imposible vencido [The Impossible Conquered] in 1729, followed by a trilingual dictionary (Spanish-Basque-Latin) in 1745. Both of these texts can be seen as early examples of an argument language loyalists would continue to make for another two centuries: namely that Basque was every bit as grammatically complex, complete, and logical as any other language of high civilization. But Larramendi went further than this. His other set of claims had to do with the ancient origins of Basque. Here we find his arguments to be notably different from that of later Basque advocates. In his very first treatise on the Basque language, De la antiguedad y universalidad del bascuence en España (1728) [On the antiquity and universality of Basque in Spain] he marshaled etymological and toponymic evidence to argue that Basque was much older than Castilian. Indeed, he argued that Euskara was the original language of Spain and had once been spoken throughout the peninsula. This antiquity led Larramendi to revive the thesis that had circulated since the sixteenth century that Basque was one of the ancient languages of Babel (Tovar 1980). The Babelian thesis held Euskara to be one of the original seventy-two languages created by Jehova at the Tower of Babel and brought to Iberia by Tubal, presumed in theological writings to be the grandson of Noah, founder and ancestral patriarch of the Iberian peoples. In short, “Spain”—that is, Christian Spain—argued Larramendi, had its origins in the Basque provinces, and the evidence for this was Euskara itself.

Why was Larramendi making such a claim, and what did it mean at this moment when the Spanish crown was attempting to rescind the political rights of the Basque provinces? To answer this it is necessary to understand that the origin of languages throughout Europe was a political terrain of battle precisely because, as Judith Irvine and Susan Gal (2000) observe, languages were regarded as the expression of natural collectivities. Histories of languages and their boundaries were read as the histories of nations and their rightful political relations. As Woolard has argued, in early modern Spain, philological debates were a means by which groups in a polyglot and polyethnic Spain jostled for status, defined alterity, and argued the terms of their coexistence and rightful rule (2004). The reconquest, the long battle against Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula followed by the subsequent absorption of Muslim and Jewish converts, had given rise to a society hierarchically divided between “Old” and “New” Christians. People or groups who could convincingly lay claim to being descendants of “Old Christians,” that is people presumed to have no Moorish or Jewish background, enjoyed superior status and access to prized positions in civil and ecclesiastical administration. The genealogy of a language was one of the more powerful ways that a collectivity could make or contest a claim to being Old or New Christians.

Mockery of a language, like praise, can be a potent weapon in larger battles for social status (Hill 1993). The attacks and defenses of Basque in this period are a case in point. The claims Larramendi made about the ancient biblical origins of Basque, just like the scorn and accusations of barbarism by Spanish philologists, have to be contextualized as part of the intensifying debate that was taking place in the eighteenth century over the relationship between the Basque provinces and the Spanish state. Historically, the Spanish Basque provinces had enjoyed special political rights, fueros, that gave them a substantial degree of self-governance. The kings of Spain came to the tree of Gernika to swear to uphold the fueros and in so doing sustain political and military alliances with the Basques. These rights were justified, however, not as an instrumental strategy of a weak state, but as an entitlement Basques had earned for their decisive role in numerous battles during the reconquest. The medieval fueros granted to the inhabitants the special status of “collective nobility” for supposedly never having fallen under Muslim rule. This status “gave Basques direct access to public offices in the Spanish administration and military” (Shafir 1995: 89) and may partly explain why we find the early growth of an urbanized Basque elite that was Spanish speaking and largely collaborative with the state. However, as the Spanish crown grew stronger and sought to centralize its power in the eighteenth century, the special rights of provinces began to be challenged (Elliot 1963). Catalonia lost its own special privileges early in the century, and it looked likely that Basques would be next. To reaffirm somewhat anachronistically, as Larramendi did, a Tubalian origin for Basque in this particular political moment was to affirm the special status of Basques as Old Christians and thus shore up the continuing legitimacy of their foral rights (Douglass 2002:99-101).²

It bears underscoring that in Larramendi's eighteenth-century treatises, an argument claiming Basque difference or uniqueness was not conceived of as an entitlement to separation from Spain. Rather, claims of Basque antiquity and Tubalian origins were presented more as evidence of the Basque people's belonging and centrality to the history of Spain; it was a claim to having a respected, even privileged place in the social order, not a claim of alterity. As William Douglass (2002:100-101) points out, this interpretation of Larramendi contradicts that of Davyyd Greenwood (1977), who, following Julio Caro Baroja (1971), presented Larramendi's work as the beginning of a mutually exclusive and conflicting conception of Spanish and Basque identities. Douglass coincides with Tovar (1980) and my own reading that “[Larramendi's] real targets are the frenchified Castilian toadies of the Bourbon rulers in Madrid who were undermining Basque privileges. And while he does launch a few pejorative statements against the Castilians in general, he is mainly on the defensive against the Castilian anti-Basque barbs of the day—notably that the language was sheer ‘gibberish' and that the Basque claim to universal noble status was pretentious” (Douglass 2002: 100).

Larramendi argued that the existence of Euskara proved the Basque people were the “legitimate pure Spaniards, descendants of the ancient settlers of Spain” and thus entitled to their special rights (Tovar 1980: 70, emphasis added). These conceptualizations, however, shift. When the fueros were lost in 1876 and Basque nationalism as a political ideology subsequently began to take shape, we see that the symbolic significance of Basque does a complete reversal. Euskara no longer links Basques to Spain, nor gives them pride of place in it. Rather it is now presented as setting Basques apart as a separate nation. Once again, etymology and linguistic evidence figure prominently as proof.

The Basque Folkloric Revival and Early Nationalism: Spanish Cities, Rural Basques

This turnaround begins to take shape in the last third of the nineteenth century with the Euskal Pizkundea, a key moment in the historical evolution of language loyalism during which Basque cultural institutions and popular festivals portrayed Euskara as part of a romanticized rural life. This movement emerged at the same time that industrialization and urbanization were producing profound economic and demographic changes that accelerated the pace of Basque-language loss and accentuated class antagonism.

Politically, this era is often dated to 1876 when, at the end of the second Carlist war, the southern Basque provinces were administratively incorporated into the Spanish state. At this time economic and political power went from being in the hands of rural notables, known as jauntxos, to the cities.³ Although the fueros were abolished, special economic privileges were retained through what were called conciertos económicos, economic pacts that granted protective tariffs, new export regulations, and decreased taxes for the Basque provinces. This situation, together with foreign capital investment that began pouring into the cities, enabled a tremendous spurt of economic growth in the iron and steel industries, as well as in mining, shipbuilding, and railroad construction (see Clark 1979: 35-37). In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the industries of the capital cities of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia began to attract laborers from southern and western Spain, as well as people from the surrounding Basque-speaking rural areas. Rapid immigration gave rise to congested working-class neighborhoods, especially near Bilbao, where Basque and Spanish laborers lived side by side and where the seeds of a powerful organized labor movement began to take root.⁴ In most histories of the Basque language, the growth of cities tends to be thought of as the prime factor that intensifies contact of Basque and Spanish speakers and leads to Hispanicization and language replacement. Philologists of the time bemoaned an increase in language mixing in popular culture and point in particular to a preference for Spanish among young women who went to the city to work as nannies and maids (Zalbide 1988: 392-93; see also Zuberogoitia and Zuberogoitia 2008). It is during this period of social and cultural transformation, writes Mikel Zalbide, that Euskara took a dramatic downturn and a long-standing practice of more or less stable bilingualism turned into “a serious hemorrhage” (1988: 392).

Of course, castellano, the Castilian language, already had a long history in the southern Basque Country. There is evidence that it was spoken in the upper social strata from the thirteenth century onward, when the provinces of Gipuzkoa, Araba, and Bizkaia were incorporated into the Crown of Castile.⁵ In his review of the evolution of Basque, Zalbide notes that bilingualism was commonplace in a broad range of people whose professions or trades placed them in ongoing relations with that elite or with other people who did not know Basque. As he puts it, there can be no doubt that well before industrialization: “even in the most Basque-speaking areas north of the watershed running into the bay of Biscay there were many [people] who used another language in addition to their native tongue, frequently more often than Basque itself: seamen and traders, clergy and authorities, teachers, doctors and lawyers” (1988: 391-92).

However, the two languages, Zalbide argues, appear to have existed in a delimited, patterned, and more or less stable diglossia; Basque and Castilian each had its distinct domains of use. With industrialization this pattern was destabilized as increasing numbers of native Basque speakers left the countryside to seek jobs in the cities and abandoned the Basque language, though not necessarily their attachment to being Basque.⁶ This gave rise, particularly in Bizkaia, to the emergence of a significant group of lower and middle-class urbanites who identified as Basque—vascos—but who were not euskaldun, Basque-speaking. This linguistic divide has continued to be a crucial and ongoing source of tension and ambiguities within the Basque-identified community.

Several factors coincided to accelerate language shift at the end of the nineteenth century. In Bizkaia the rapid increase and large concentrations of Spanish-speaking labor migrants was certainly one and is probably the most frequently mentioned factor. Also relevant, however, was the growing importance of schooling and literacy in Spanish for the general population. Basque was not formally taught in schools, and as a result literacy in Basque was minimal in the general population. In 1857 the Ley Moyano establishing mandatory primary education turned the neglect of Basque in education to outright banishment by explicitly prohibiting Basque in public schools. Meanwhile, the hostility toward Basque in the more abundant and more prestigious schools run by religious orders was legendary (Tejerina 1992: 88-89; Michelena 1977). Basque effectively had no place in formal educational institutions.

Language shift, however, is rarely just a case of the actual numbers or proportions of speakers or even a result of institutional marginalization or prohibition. Linguistic anthropologists have amply shown that language choices and processes of shift are strongly influenced by how languages are symbolically linked to structures of power, such as class status, gender, or the way a language is identified with access to desired livelihoods or valued social networks (see Gal 1979, 1987; Woolard 1985; Kulick 1992). Immigration and the resulting demographic tilt that gave rise to concentrations of Spanish-speakers in the working-class neighborhoods of the expanding cities—particularly Bilbao—are undoubtedly factors responsible for the shift to Spanish. But it would be a mistake to attribute language shift solely to institutional prohibition or the large influx of Spanish speakers. As Zalbide (1988) is keen to point out, the linguistic profile of the upper classes in the new society is also relevant. The people of Basque descent who wielded economic and political power in the cities were no longer Basque speakers by ...