Pour une évaluation des critères internes de fragilisation d'une langue: le cas du basque souletin

Abstract

Languages under threat have been studied particularly from the point of view of what are termed external origins. Therefore, the focus is generally ethnolinguistic, sociolinguistic and pscyholinguistic. The extraction of the linguistic facts which could be the signs of the fragilization and debilitation of these languages will permit an improvement and “fine-tuning” of the key to the internal criteria. All of this within the perspective of a typology. From this point of view, the Basque spoken in Zuberoa, a dialect which is in danger of extinction, is characterized by the following features: the absence of lexical creation, resorting to the French to the detriment of the equivalent Basque term, simplification of syntax, syntactic copying and loss of expressiveness and modalization. On the other hand, lexical loan, the existence of fluctuations and doubts regarding phonemes and the evolution of the phonological system are not in this case conclusive criteria.