Standardisation of Basque: From grammar (1968) to pronunciation (1998)

Abstract

This paper deals with the standardisation of the Basque language. Standardisation will be here understood as the codification of a linguistic variety accepted by the majority of speakers as a common form of the language. In the case of Basque, that stage was reached soon after the Royal Academy of the Basque Language (Euskaltzaindia in Basque) proclaimed what was called Unified Basque (Euskara Batua) in 1968. It was then that the first stone was laid in a long and fundamentally successful process now facing the challenge of standardising pronunciation or, rather, finding a consensus on the pronunciation(s) of standard Basque. The main hypothesis to explain the success of Basque standardisation is that a historical conjunction of political and ideological circumstances worked as a con- spiracy of factors towards what constitutes so far the largest agreement ever reached by Basque speakers. Unified Basque achieved a social consensus that other political or cultural issues never obtained. Technicalities are kept to a minimum in this paper. More phonological details may be found in Oñederra (forthcoming), a work with which this one has obvious intersections.1