Age and Variation: a Case Study of Basque IRANTZU EPELDE

major pattern in Basque language variation with age as the independent variable in informal conversational data collected by Basque speakers and (2) to examine alternative patterns which may be indicative of change in the future. Language variation can mark stable class differences or stable sex differences in communities, but it can also indicate instability and change. When it marks change, the primary social correlate is age (Chambers 2002), and the change reveals itself prototypically in a pattern whereby some minor variant in the speech of the oldest generation occurs with greater frequency in the middle generation and with still greater frequency in the youngest generation. If the incoming variant truly represents a linguistic change (Labov 1994, Trudgill 1974), as opposed to an ephemeral innovation as for some slang expressions or an age-graded change, it will be marked by increasing frequency down the age scale. I will consider the applicability of these concepts to data emerging from Origin and evolution of Basque Dialects project*, in which we explore several distinctive dialects of Basque and their development analysing naturally occurring conversations of nativ