Basque in talk media: from the gifting to the performance era

Abstract

Basque was introduced throughout the audio-visual media in the 80s with the creation in1982 of the Basque State Broadcaster,Euskal Irrati-Telebista(EITB), which began broadcasting in December of that year. From that time to the present the Basque audio-visual media have developed a whole media structure and have also adopted language policy criteria that clearly differentiate them from how their policies in the 80s used to be. Borrowing from Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes’ proposal for characterising the evolution of minority-language media (Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes 2011), we differentiate in this work three eras in that development of Basque in the talk media: The gifting era, the service era and the performance era. Like Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes (2011), we can also identify in the Basque case different key policy actors, values and expanded dominant language identities and practices in those policy eras.