86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who's an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who'd learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn't alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for "unicorn language users", aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.) Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/734191628928106496/transcript-episode-86-itxaso-interview Announcements: Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We appreciate your support so much, and it was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. If you'd like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 Listener Survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode (https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-75-2022-82426500) and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023: https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23 In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about giving advice by answering your linguistics questions! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey. Listen to our latest bonus here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-81-advice-92128507 For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/734191359532122112/episode-86-revival-reggaeton-and-rejecting