Bilingual Speech in Basque communities: code-switching among French-Basque and Spanish-Basque speakers. – ACOBA

Language contact and multilingualism represent a developing research domain that have attracted the attention of researchers from various disciplines: linguistics, sociology, political sciences, psychology, neuroscience. The actual project, entitled Bilingual speech: Code switching among French-Basque and Spanish-Basque speakers, concentrates on the linguistic aspect of language contact.
The project includes four labs: two labs specialised in Basque languages (the lab IKER at Bayonne, and the lab ELEBILAB at Vitoria-Gasteiz) and two labs specialised in bilingualism and in creating bilingual corpuses (SEDYL at Paris, and the ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism at Bangor). The aim of the project is to make a significant contribution to the investigation of intrasentential bilingual speech that makes use of code-switching and so mark the start of a totally new research field in Basque studies. With this final aim, the project will elaborate a corpus and a data-base on code-switching among the Basque speaking bilinguals in France and Spain. Furthermore, the project will investigate these data with the aim of contributing to the theoretical debate on the grammar of sentences with intrasentential switching.
Every expert on the topic admits that code-switching is not related to any language defficiency. On the contrary, it’s been observed that bilingual speakers use code-switching for various communicative purposes (Gardner-Chloros 2009b): as social or identity marker (Myers-Scotton 1993b), as a discourse resource (Gafaranga 2009). Moreover, the extended use of this practise has been confirmed in a considerable amount of sociolinguistic configurations.
The spontaneous and natural use of two languages within the same discourse (intersentential switching) or, specially, within the same sentence (intrasentential switching), a use that depends clearly on pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors, represents a revealing source of information of the linguistic competence and the grammatical structure of languages (Woolford 1983, Meisel 1994, Myers-Scotton 2002). The research on the grammar of bilingual productions has providen evidence in favour of the idea that intrasentential switching does not take place randomly and must obey morphosyntactic constraints (Poplack 1980). This has opened a debate on the existence of specific universal principles that govern intrasentential switches (Poplack & Sankoff 1981, Di Sciullo & al 1986, Myers-Scotton 1993, Bhatt 1997, Muysken 2000, Myers-Scotton & Jake 2009, MacSwan 2009).
Code-switching among Basque speakers has not been studied yet –with the exception of some acquisition studies (Barreña & Ezeizabarrena 1999, 2000, Manterola & Ezeizabarrena 2004, Barreña, Ezeizabarrena & García 2008)–. The configurations offered by Basque (SOV, head-final, ergative, rich casual system) and French and Spanish (SVO, head-initial, accusative, prepositional) show very different morphosyntactic properties, and hence, very interesting for code-switching studies. The study of the collected corpus, together with the fact that different sociolinguistic profiles are found among the Basque-French and Basque-Spanish bilingual speakers, will open the way to a better understanding of the grammar of bilingual sentences as well as the contraints that these obey.
Following Muysken (2000) –who proposes a classification of switching types that allows us to take into account the typological properties of switched languages as well as the sociological differences of bilinguism–, the bilingual Basque-Spanish and Basque-French corpus gathering (that will be made available for consultation on the web) will take into consideration the main bilingual communities found among the Basque speaking communities. Due to the theoretical and contrastive research that will follow this study, the project provides a novel contribution to the field of Basque studies, enriching enormously the research on code-switching.