Volume 30, Issue 1

This paper deals with the standardisation of the Basque language. Standardisation will be here understood as the codification of a linguistic variety accepted by the majority of speakers as a common form of the language. In the case of Basque, that stage was reached soon after the Royal Academy of the Basque Language (Euskaltzaindia in Basque) proclaimed what was called Unified Basque (Euskara Batua) in 1968. It was then that the first stone was laid in a long and fundamentally successful process now facing the challenge of standardising pronunciation or, rather, finding a consensus on the pronunciation(s) of standard Basque. The main hypothesis to explain the success of Basque standardisation is that a historical conjunction of political and ideological circumstances worked as a conspiracy of factors towards what constitutes so far the largest agreement ever reached by Basque speakers. Unified Basque achieved a social consensus that other political or cultural issues never obtained. Technicalities are kept to a minimum in this paper. More phonological details may be found in Onederra (forthcoming), a work with which this one has obvious intersections.

The world is connecting in many complex ways, driven by the globally integrated nature of technological innovation and human mobility across continents. Never before have so many different speakers and languages existed side by side in the OECD countries as they do today. This reality has placed multilingualism in the spotlight. Increased migration and transcultural flows across borders in Europe have highlighted the urgency for research on multilingualism in the individual and society. Academic institutions have recognized the necessity for such knowledge and research centers have evolved to meet this challenge (cf. Obermayer et al. 2014). MultiLing - the Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan is a research center aimed at academic excellence and financed by the Research Council of Norway through its Center of Excellence scheme. MultiLing is hosted by the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Oslo in Norway. It opened in June of 2013 and is currently in its first five-year period of operation. The main goal of the Center is to generate state-of-the-art scientific knowledge on individual and societal multilingualism across the lifespan that will address the challenges and potentials multilingualism poses for the individual in the family, school, other institutions, and society in general. Moreover, the Center aims at providing research-based knowledge on multilingualism to central policymakers and stakeholders. Language planning and the standardization of languages are some of the Center’s key research foci and are indeed vital issues today at the top of the agenda for policymakers. The Center’s vision is to contribute to how society can deal with the challenges of multilingualism through increased knowledge, promoting agency for individuals in society, and a better quality of life, no matter what linguistic and social background.