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Jon Gotzon's syncretic bilingual parody: Pushing the boundaries of ‘authentic’ Basque

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2020

Agurtzane Elordui Open the ORCID record for Agurtzane Elordui [Opens in a new window]
Agurtzane Elordui*
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country General Research Services - Basque Language and Communication, Spain
*
Address for correspondence: Agurtzane Elordui, University of the Basque Country, NOR Research Group, Basque Language and Communication, Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication, Sarriena Auzoa z/g Leioa 48940, Spainagurtzane.elordui@ehu.eus
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Abstract

In normative, academic, and informative works on Basque there are constant debates on the boundaries of what is meant by ‘authentic Basque’ and, alongside that, by ‘authentic Basque speaker’. In the current Basque media, these tensions are often addressed by means of creative practices, as in other minority contexts, by means of satire and other forms of humour, especially parody. In this work my subject is the character Jon Gotzon, who engages in parody on the radio programme Gaztea. Jon Gotzon is a hyperbolic and parodic stylisation of a new Basque speaker. He challenges ‘authentic’ and ‘native’ Basque-speaking styles in his syncretic bilingual stylisation and parodic discourse. In this research, I study the way this parody takes advantages of carnivalesque strategies in order to question fixed ideological hierarchies on Basqueness, and I explore the ideological positions Jon Gotzon's parody reveals, especially with respect to hybrid identities in the Basque community. (Parody, stylisation, authenticity, minority media, Basque, humour)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 51 - 72
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the article as well as the journal editors for their encouraging comments and invaluable insights, which helped make this paper stronger. My gratitude also goes to Mikel Fernández, Jon Lamarka, Odile Kruzeta, and Edurne Garmendia for their help and patience during these years. All misunderstandings and shortcomings are of course my own.

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