Typological passport of Basque as a minority language

Abstract

The aim of the research is to make an inventory of the most salient typological traits of Basque as one of the extant minority languages, whose origin and typological status have been debated ever since the 16th century. Despite the well-meaning attempts to compile a unified standard of Basque, the majority of its speakers communicate using one of its numerous dialects. Apart from that, most of the contemporary coursebooks of Basque convey contradictory messages about its main grammatical features. This lack of uniformity acts as an impediment on the way to learning Basque or forming a well-defined concept of its typology. To enhance and spread knowledge about Basque typology, the present research adopts the methodology of contrastive-typological studies, namely, the method of typological passport developed by Professor V.D. Arakin. The empirical data for the research were drawn from the courseand textbooks recommended by The Royal Academy of the Basque Language. Research results revealed a number of universal typological traits shared by Basque with well-studied languages of the world, such as the presence of articles, cases, assimilation, post-modifying adjectives, etc. However, from the perspective of contrastive typology, it is the unique typological features that are most typologically and conceptually salient, such as voiced and devoiced aspiration, variations in the pronunciation of diaphonic sounds, non-systematic (non-pleonastic) marking of number, conceptual salience of specific numerals (2, 4, and 11), neutral and emphatic world-building patterns as well the absence of some models altogether (blending, shortening, back-formation). Research results show that the typological passport of Basque can be defined as an agglutinative language with suffixes, syntactic agreement and fusions at morphemic junctures. One of the avenues for further research is a multifactorial analysis with a view to obtaining statistical data about typologically significant categories of Basque.