Don't Know Much about History? Methodological Insights and Challenges in Examining the Archival Record to Understand Gendered Linguistic Inequalities

In this paper, I share methodological challenges I have faced in trying to understand the historical factors contributing to gendered inequalities that persist in the use and symbolic meaning of the Basque language (“Euskera”).   Mainstream discourses currently define a Basque person who speaks the Basque language, which presumably would make the identity available to second-language learners of the language in addition to native speakers.  The linguistic properties of the language also make the identity seemingly available to female as male speakers alike: Euskera has no grammatical gender (“el” or “la”) or natural gender (“she” or “he”). The only place that gender is marked is in the second-person familiar pronoun, “hi;” noka marks the addressee as female; toka marks the addresses as male. However, my ethnographic research has shown that the prototypical Basque is constructed as the native, male speaker who uses the familiar. I have further shown that contemporary discourses consider noka as “semiotically inferior” to toka even as it is linguistically equal:  its use is “looked badly” upon and considered disrespectful, while toka is semiotically linked primarily to hegemonic masculinity, which has both negative and positive associations. To better understand the differential symbolic weight attached to noka and toka, I have used methods drawn from sociolinguistics and historical sociolinguistics – such as intra-textual analysis --to examine the archival record, composed primarily of biblical texts, folksong, legends and myths.   To my knowledge, however, few sociologists have examined historical documents such as these to understand gendered use of linguistic variables in the present.  In this paper, I will share some findings, insights and challenges my methodological approach with regard to the Basque case have yielded thus far.