Basque bilingualism: A tale of many stories

The present volume presents six papers, which study a number of topics in Basque by bilingual Basque–Spanish children growing up in the Autonomous Basque Region in Spain. The authors have dealt with a number of subjects, which range from lexical to genuinely syntactic issues, whereby all papers address the issue of whether one of the languages acquired by a child influences the other. The language combination studied in the present volume offers plenty of opportunities to inquire whether cross-linguistic influence occurs and which factors may determine or explain its duration, language internal or structural issues and language external or sociolinguistic factors. For the study of any phenomena that concern the Basque and Spanish languages, it is important to men-tion that these two languages have coexisted for many centuries, which has resulted in a number of contact phenomena that are already grammaticalized (see below). For the study of early language acquisition and language learning at school, it is of the utmost importance to take the complex sociolinguistic environment into account when drawing conclusions and making generalizations on the basis of a limited corpus. In what follows, we will briefly present the issue of cross-linguistic influence as it is discussed at present, we continue with a description of the most important gram-matical facts and will finish with the actual sociolinguistic situation, which includes a historica