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Show HONORS COLLEGE SPRING 2013 Savannah Manwill Marianna Di Paolo 224 SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF BASQUE IN THE U.S. Savannah Manwill (Marianna Di Paolo) Department of Linguistics University of Utah This thesis examines the history of the Basques (both in Europe and the United States), the ethnolinguistic vitality of Basque in the U.S. (including the role of language and language revi-talization efforts), and some linguistic features of Basque today. It makes use of various articles, studies, and internet sources to attempt to define what it means to be Basque-American in the twenty-first century. Basque, both as a language and a culture, has a history that has been traced back to thousands of years ago, with the first hard evidence of the language appearing with recorded history. The Basque diaspora began in the sixteenth century and slowly continued for the next few centuries. There was a revitalization of the diaspora in the mid-nineteenth century with Basques immigrating to parts of South America, including Argentina, Uruguay, and, eventually, the United States. After giving up their dreams of becoming rich by finding gold in the U.S., many of the Basques that immigrated there settled into communities in the West and started to herd sheep. Most of them moved to parts of California, Nevada, or Idaho. Although little is known about the actual size of the population until 1980 when "Basque" became a distinguished choice on the ethnicity/race section of the U.S. Census, there is n o w estimated to be around 54,000 Basque-Americans in the United States. Today, Basque is classified as a vulnerable language by UNESCO, leading many movements in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC) to revitalize it. Recently, this revitalization effort has spread to the U.S. through Basque clubs and organizations. Although there are efforts supporting the learning of and perpetuation of the Basque language in the U.S., it appears that the new Basque identity in the U.S. does not require fluency in the language as a determining factor of being classified as Basque-American. This thesis also briefly examines some notable features of the Basque language. This includes its use of fricatives and affricates phonologically, its use of the ergative-absolutive case, and its use of a relatively free word order syntactically. |