Basque informal talk increasingly restricted to men: The role of gender in the form of address hika

Abstract

Many languages make a T/V distinction when addressing an interlocutor, and Basque also has two main levels of formality: zuka (formal) and hika (informal). The peculiarity of the Basque informal form of address hika is that its verbal morphology varies depending on the addressee's gender. The use of hika has dramatically decreased in most parts of the Basque Country, and even in those areas where it is still widely spoken, the female form (noka) is on the verge of extinction. In this study, we seek to provide data to confirm this decreasing trend to examine the reasons behind such pronounced gender differences in usage. We used a questionnaire consisting of both numeric and narrative parts to elicit data, and 1,247 participants responded. The results corroborate the decreasing tendency found in other studies, and the loss of female forms is attributed to several factors including lack of prestige, transmission gap, and sexism.

How revolution and gender dynamics affected Nepali 3rd-person honorification from the 1990s to the 2010s: A corpus analysis

“…Moreover women might both use and receive more honorific forms than men, coalescing around the MedHon level, while men will have higher levels of LoHon use. This avoidance of the lower honorific register for women due to societal expectations has also been seen in Basque (Bereziartua & Muguruza 2021), where the informal register referring to women is close to disappearing. The use of higher honorific forms for women might also indicate the link between honorification and social distance, where avoidance of the LoHon level with women signifies their alienation in society.…”