Basque informal talk increasingly restricted to men: The role of gender in the form of address hika

Abstract

Many languages make a T/V distinction when addressing an interlocutor, and Basque also has two main levels of formality: zuka (formal) and hika (informal). The peculiarity of the Basque informal form of address hika is that its verbal morphology varies depending on the addressee’s gender. The use of hika has dramatically decreased in most parts of the Basque Country, and even in those areas where it is still widely spoken, the female form (noka) is on the verge of extinction. In this study, we seek to provide data to confirm this decreasing trend to examine the reasons behind such pronounced gender differences in usage. We used a questionnaire consisting of both numeric and narrative parts to elicit data, and 1,247 participants responded. The results corroborate the decreasing tendency found in other studies, and the loss of female forms is attributed to several factors including lack of prestige, transmission gap, and sexism.