ELL: old traditions vs. modern life in linguistic minorities

[Jokin Garatea]

As a Basque speaker I'd like to give my thought on the debate about old speakers
vs. young learners,
The Basque Speaking TV (at  the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country we
have another "Basque" TV into Spanish which audience is three times the Basque
Speaking one) is quite a good example of good job with budget liminations and
audience "potentialities" (500,000 Basque Speakers). The impact of viewers is
not very high. Most appreciated  TV programms are sports. Soccer is the nº 1 and
traditional sports follow to soccer. Yes, we do have dubbed US films and series
(but not much audience). The most appreciated fiction programmes are for
children (between 6-15) and also the local series. But this is the reality, the
"TV offer" is enormous, PPV and general one, and for doing good content, to be
able to compete, you need either money and/or creativity (very scarcing in these
days).
Good actors, actress and speakers leave the local TV for joining big Spanish TVs
(A3, T5, TVE) big salaries, big audience, big professional careers. The talent
always leaves.
Despite all the above mentioned, the Basque TV is fighting this challenge quite
professionaly and with enaugh creativity. It played a very good role in language
normalisation in the last 20 years and is very appreciated, as a prestiged TV,
by basque speaking people.
Besides this, Basque language is suffering an evolution where a lot of slang
terminology from TV is used normally by either young and old people( by this I
am referring to the parents of the young people) and a Basque dialect from
Gipuzkoa (the most used in the BQ TV) is becoming the prime one and is being
used by other basque dialect speakers..
A good role for modernisation of the language, respecting/preserving the
language, is being played by the Basque Language Academy (Euskaltzaindia).
And another role of language normalisation is played both by the
University/Schhols and the entrepreneurial sector. One good example is the
project baGOAz (means lets go in Basque). baGOAz is a project developed by the
Cluster of Telecommunications of the Basque Country (http://www.gaia.es)
together with  Elhuyar. The project consists in facilitating the implementation
of Business excellence(Total quality Management) in Local councils, enterprises
and Vocational Education Centers using IT technologis, and is being done totally
in Basque. Why we develped it? the fact was that whatever institution willing to
implement TQM in their own entity had to do it either in english and/or in
Spanish but not in Basque though it was a clear interest from many companies to
do it in Basque :-(.
The Telecom Cluster used a successful project financed by the European
commission (http://www.gaia.es/tqmnet), translated and adapted the content
relatd to Bussiness excellence into Basque and launched the project
(http://www.bagoaz.net). the request for participating in the project have been
enormous and finally 13 entities out of 40 were selected to participate in the
project.
Some conclusions out os this. The project is using a topic of utmost interest
(Business excellence), innovation (IT technologies to facilitate the
implementation), modernising a language (creating/adapting terminology related
to Total Quality Management) and giving prestige to it.
Good conclusion the Basque is a language we also can use also for talking about
EXCELLENCE and working with excellence. All this means a prestige language.
Best Regards,
Jokin

Gerd Jendraschek wrote:

> One additional thought on the debate about old speakers vs. young learners.
>
> > Once again this raises the question of language and identity and langauge
> > and culture, as well as potential splits between enthusiasts. Younger
> > campaigners are more willing to divorce the language from the traditional
> > culture that older native speakers identify with and regret the passing
> of:
> > some younger people experienced the traditional culture as repressive, so
> it
> > may not be good PR to link language to old culture too much!
> >
>
> Why should it be "either-or"?? I would rather say that culture must embrace
> both directions, the past AND the future. If you want to see a good example
> of how a revitalization movement links language to both old and new culture,
> take a look at Basque television. You have many reports on traditional
> sports, festivities, food, singing etc. On the same channel, you have a lot
> of programming for children (quite untraditional comic strips) as well as
> dubbed US films and series. Of course only few linguistic minorities can
> afford TV in their language, but whatever the strategy of language spread
> may be, the principle should be the same. The important point is not to be
> traditional vs.modern, but to be attractive. It is not a particularity of
> linguistic minorities that old and young members do not share the same
> interests. But whereas this is not a big tragedy in stable communities, it
> is problematic in the case of endangered languages. This is particularly
> visible in the Occitan area: a newspaper article on Occitan in schools was
> entitled 'En Languedoc-Roussillon, de l'occitan "naturel" à l'occitan
> "chimique"'. The old speak a local variety whereas the young learn a
> semi-standardized 'chemical' form, and moreover, even if they both speak the
> same language, there is not much they can talk about with each other because
> they don't have the same cultural background any more.
>
> However, the debate on whether language preservation should give a priority
> to traditional or modern culture depends a lot on the economic structure of
> the community. In Manx, there seems to be a lot of financial terminology
> (maybe someone on the list can say more about this case), as financial
> services are a major source of income. Nomadic tribes in the rain forest
> however would have no need for a glossary on financial services.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Gerd Jendraschek
>
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--
Jokin Garatea.
International Department.
E-mail/ mailto:garatea at gaia.es
GAIA.http://www.gaia.es
Portuetxe Bidea 14, Edif. Ibaeta.
20018 San Sebastián. España
Tel: 34 943 316666, Fax: 34 943 311066

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