Linguistic landscape in a rural Basque area: a case study in Ondarroa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Basque is one of the official languages spoken in the Basque Country and although it is usually considered the minoritised language, its situation might be different in rural areas. The presence of Basque and Spanish has been previously reported in urban areas [Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2006). Linguistic landscape and minority languages. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3(1), 67–80. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790710608668386], but their presence in rural areas remains unknown. To address this gap, the linguistic landscape (LL) of a rural town (Ondarroa, Bizkaia) is examined. For such a purpose, the signs in the main shopping street of Ondarroa (both top-down and bottom-up signs) are included in the analysis. The results show that contrary to the situation of Basque in urban areas (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006), Basque is the language with the largest presence in the LL of the street in Ondarroa. This is an indicative of the reproduction of the linguistic situation of the town, which subverts the current institutional linguistic policies. This particular LL could be considered as highly bilingual due to the presence of bilingual signs in Basque and Spanish; the presence of Spanish monolingual signs is minimal. The analysis of this LL would indicate that Basque sometimes is the majority language, at least in rural Basque areas.