Dialect divergence and identity in Basque Spanish

The present study is a sociolinguistic analysis of phonological, morphophonological lexical features of Basque Spanish, the contact variety resulting from the interaction of Basque and Spanish. These features are: the deletion of intervocalic (th) in word ending --ado; the Basque multiple vibrant (r); the use of a Basque dental affricate (tz); as well as the use borrowings from Basque.;The focus is on the linguistic consequences of the contemporary Basque linguistic revitalization movement and on two social groups as new catalyst of language change: new-Basque bilinguals and the Basque left wing nationalist community of practice. The main idea is that these features have become markers of a Basque identity.;This study employs a social network methodology to show how the usage of contact-features is also related to the speaker's linguistic networks that is, the frequency of contact that speakers that maintain with Basque-speakers in domains like the family, schooling and friends. Moreover, I also take into account the heterogeneous composition of the Basque Country in terms of parental origin and language spoken at home. For example, how whether the speaker comes from Spanish immigrant parents or from parents that---despite not speaking Basque---were raised in a highly Basque speaking area, affects the use of the variants; or the difference between individuals who have different types of linguistic competences (they can be Basque bilingual though intergenerational transmission, or come from a Spanish monolingual family but have learnt Basque in immersion schools, or be Spanish monolingual).;I examine the spoken Spanish in two dissimilar linguistic contact areas: the fishing community of Bermeo (with 74% Basque/Spanish bilingualism) and the city of Bilbao (with 20% bilingualism). In the last three decades, Bilbao, a prototypical low-contact area, has made strong efforts in Basque language and culture revitalization. This contemporary language movement has been most successful in both the bilingual school systems and among Basque militant networks. The situation in Bilbao contrasts with that of the coastal village of Bermeo where the percentage of Basque usage is higher than in Bilbao although language usage has been sharply decreasing among the younger generations.;The study concludes different results for each of the linguistic variables. The extralinguistic factors 'area of residence', 'parental origin', 'language spoken at home' and 'relative exposure to Basque' have an effect on the appearance of the Basque variant [aw], for the /-ado/ variable. In the case of the use of the multiple vibrant (r), the results show that 'parental origin' and 'area of residence' of the speaker are the explanatory social factors for the use of the Basque variant. The variable (tz) and 'borrowings from Basque' are mostly employed by young generations of urban Basque political networks and neo-Basque speakers who speak mostly Spanish despite attending Basque immersion programs. Contrarily, rural speaker try to avoid the usage of these variants as they mark a perceived lower command of the Spanish standard registers.