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Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 227–246

Chapter 10
(Il)literacy and language change

Non-standard relative constructions in historical Basque

ORCID logo | University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU
ORCID logo | University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU

In this paper we examine a corpus of sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Basque private letters and administration documents from a historical sociolinguistic point of view. Because of the diglossic situation, such texts are rare but valuable in the historical corpus of Basque. In particular, we analyse relative clauses with the pronoun zein ‘which’. The construction was borrowed from Romance by highly literate bilinguals, but then spread, especially through formulaic language, to less literate writers too. We focus on the development of non-standard variants of this relative clause, which are common in our corpus, but not found in printed literary texts. We argue that the sociolinguistic context was crucial in the emergence, spread and syntactic change of the relative construction.

Keywords: historical sociolinguistics, syntax, relative clauses, literacy, Basque
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basque and Romance relativisation strategies
  • 3.Writing in Basque before the twentieth century
    • 3.1The historical sociolinguistics of Basque
    • 3.2Literacy and biliteracy
  • 4. Zein RCs in administrative texts and letters
    • 4.1Non-canonical texts in Basque historical corpus
    • 4.2The frequency of zein RCs
    • 4.3Non-standard variants
    • 4.4 Zein relatives and formulaic language
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations and glossing conventions
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 June 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.10kra
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