The Economics of "Why is it so hard to save a threatened Language?"

We study the language choice behavior of bilingual speakers in modern societies, such as the Basque Country, Ireland andWales. These countries have two o cial languages:A, spoken by all, and B, spoken by a minority. We think of the bilinguals in those societies as a population playing repeatedly a Bayesian game in which, they must choose strategically the language, A or B, that might be used in the interaction. The choice has to be made under imperfect information about the linguistic type of the interlocutors. We take the Nash equilibrium of the language use game as a model for real life language choice behavior. It is shown that the predictions made with this model t very well the data about the actual use, contained in the censuses, of Basque, Irish and Welsh languages. Then the question posed by Fishman (2001),which appears in the title, is answered as follows: it is hard, mainly, because bilingual speakers have reached an equilibrium which is evolutionary stable. This means that to solve fast and in a re ex manner their frequent language coordination problem, bilinguals have developed linguistic conventions based chie y on the strategy 'Use the same language as your interlocutor', which weakens the actual use of B.1

Bilingual Lexicography:Relevance of Corpora. The Example of German-Basque as Language Pair

Presentation for the 5th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC 2013), V Congreso Internacional de Lingüistica de Corpus.

Language distance and non-native syntactic processing: Evidence from event-related potentials

[EN] In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that differences in native versus non-native language processing strongly correlate with language distance: native/non-native processing differences obtain if a syntactic parameter of the non-native grammar diverges from the native grammar. Otherwise, non-native processing will approximate native processing as levels of proficiency increase. We focus on three syntactic parameters: (i) the head parameter, (ii) argument alignment (ergative/accusative), and (iii) verb agreement. The first two diverge in Basque and Spanish, but the third is the same in both languages. Our results reveal that native and non-native processing differs for the diverging syntactic parameters, but not for the convergent one. These findings indicate that language distance has a significant impact in non-native language processing.

More than one language in the brain

Boeckx C., M.C. Horno & J.L. Mendívil (Eds.)

Processing Facilitation Strategies in OV and VO Languages: A Corpus Study

The present corpus study aimed to examine whether Basque (OV) resorts more often than Spanish (VO) to certain grammatical operations, in order to minimi ze the number of arguments to be processed before the verb. Ueno & Polinsky (2009) argue that VO/OV languages use certain grammatical resources with different frequencies in order to facilitate real-time processing. They observe that both OV and VO languages in their sample (Japanese, Turkish and Spanish) have a similar frequency of use of subject pro-drop; however, they find that OV languages (Japanese, Turkish) use more intransitive sentences than VO languages (English, Spanish), and conclude this is an OV-specific strategy to facilitate processing. We conducted a comparative corpus study of Spanish (VO) and Basque (OV). Results show (a) that the fre- quency of use of subject pro-drop is higher in Basque than in Spanish; and (b) Basque does not use more intransitive sentences than Spanish; both languages have a similar frequency of intransitive sentences. Based on these findings, we conclude that the frequency of use of grammatical resources to facilitate the processing does not depend on a single typological trait (VO/OV) but it is modulated by the concurrence of other grammatical feature.

ENEKuS – a key model for managing the transformation of the normalisation of the Basque language in the workplace

The aim of this study is to develop a reference model for intervention in the language processes applied to the transformation of language normalisation within organisations of a socio-economic nature. It is based on the case study of an experience carried out over10 years within a trades’ union confederation, and has pursued a strategy of a basically qualitative research carried out in three stages: 1) undertaking field work through application of action-research methodology, 2) reconstructing experiences following processes of systematisation and conceptualisation of the systematised data, applying methodologies for the Systematisation of Experiences and Grounded Theory, and 3) formulating a model for intervention, applying the Systems Approach methodology. Finally, we identified nine key ideas that make up the conceptual framework for the ENEKuS reference model, which is structured in nine ‘action points', each having an operating sub-model applicable in practice.