Bertso Eskola, Youth Identities and New Speakers

This paper explores the experience and impact of participation in afterschool oral improvisation workshops -- bertso workshops -- for young Basque speakers. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews among young people in the Northern Basque Country, the researcher, a practicing improviser, bertsolari, herself, argues that the bertso workshop is best understood as a community of practice wherein they create relationships of trust and empathy, take the floor in front of their peers and debate and think together, where individual's identities are constructed in mutual influence, and where linguistic identity is built in conjunction with youth identities. Hence, for these young people, the community of practice at the bertso workshop is a place in which to develop their youth identities in Basque and their Basque-speaker identities within youth culture. This case study also explores tensions that arise between the egalitarian ethos of the bertso workshop on the one hand, where all speakers are equal, and the entrenched language ideologies that, on the other, attribute greater authenticity to improvisers from Basque-speaking families.