Jacqueline L. Urla
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 1996-1997
Reviving an Ancient Language
Euskara, the ancient tongue of the Basque people, is one of the few surviving
pre-Indo-European languages in Europe. During the Franco era it was branded
as seditious, but since the mid-1970s the movement to revive Basque has been
gaining visibility and popular support. Being Basque, Speaking Basque,
Jacqueline Urla's book-in-progress, is based on more than a decade of ethnographic
fieldwork in the Spanish province of Gipuzkoa. In it, Urla looks at the culture
of Basque language activists and the diverse strategies they employ to ensure
the survival of Euskara into the next century.
"The language revival 'movement' is, in fact, very heterogeneous
in both ideologies and strategies," Urla said. "Language activists" is
a catchall label that includes intellectuals, artists, musicians, linguists,
teachers, parents, and young people of varying walks of life. They work in a
broad range of configurations, from formal organizations dedicated to promoting
Basque education, standardization, and legal status to local grassroots groups
engaged in social activities that lie outside the realm of formal language planning.
Urla's book devotes particular attention to the radical Basque youth culture
and its use of low-power free radio, community magazines, comic books, and joking,
slang, and parody. Through such means, Urla suggests, young people challenge
Basque marginality by offering alternative ways of understanding language and
the self.
"Bringing together ethnography, sociology of language,
and cultural studies, this book takes a broad view of language politics, situating
the struggles over grammar, orthographies, and literacy within the larger contestation
over what it means to be modern, to have a culture, a language, or an ethnic
identity in an increasingly transnationalized world," Urla writes. Her manuscript
examines what it means to be Basque, the role of the language movement in the
reemergence of Basque nationalist political activity, the debate about standardization,
the growth of community-based language schools, the free radio movement, and
the proliferation of Basque-language punk-rock, protest, and traditional music
groups.
Urla sees her work as bridging cultural and linguistic
anthropology. "I'm not doing linguistic analysis, but I am concerned with
language ideology," she said. "I feel that cultural studies scholars
haven't really looked at language issues as a part of multiculturalism. Language
is intimately connected with people's lives. I want to convey the sense of investment
and urgency that many minority language speakers feel."
"One of my aims is to show that language revival
strategies in the twentieth century derive from two assumptions: first, that
language is central to cultural identity; second, that language is a social fact
that can and must be planned in order to survive." Noting that Basque language
revival has received much less attention than have the Basque nationalist movement
and political violence, Urla said, "I want to demonstrate that not all nationalist
movements are about extreme ethnocentrism. The media tend to emphasize the evils
of nationalism, but the youth strategies I'm exploring are inclusive, not exclusive."
Affiliation at time of award: Associate professor
of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Return to Resident
Scholars 1996-97
