‘Basque for all?’ Ideology and identity in migrants’ perceptions of Basque

Abstract

This PhD thesis explores language attitudes and ideologies among migrant students of Basque in the Basque Autonomous Community of Spain. I aim to explore the contexts of language attitude formation in interaction, and how these attitudes in turn, reflect the underlying ideological indexicalities that contribute to the creation of social categories. The processes of attitude construction and ideologies that guide them are then influential and consequential for group identity formation, for instance, when migrant learners position themselves on the scale of belonging to ‘Basqueness’ understood as a group identity.
In this project I analyse three areas in which this influence of ideologies on attitudes and identity construction was found particularly significant and consequential for migrant learners of Basque: the construction of space in which Basque group identity is embedded and based on Basque resources subjected to processes of scalar evaluation; the construction of authenticity in relation to speakers, language and spaces; as well as in the construction of Basque language as resources convertible into economic capital. All these three areas show that essentialist and constructionist discourses on minoritised languages and group identity intertwine in the representations of social categories, such as migrants, language, language speaker. This has consequences on the extent to which migrant learners position and identify themselves as belonging to ‘Basqueness’.
This project is ethnographically oriented and the data comes from observations and participation in Basque classes for adult migrants, interviews with class participants and interviews with other Basque learners at various language centres throughout the Basque Autonomous Community, as well as from Basque public institutions’ publications with language course descriptions and campaigns directed at migrant Basque learners.

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