Ser and estar variation in the Spanish of the Basque Country

The present study seeks to investigate the claim of Kimberly Geeslin & Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes (2008) that in the Spanish of the Basque Country there is extension of estar. In this study the pool of participants was extended and it was divided in three subgroups depending on their type of bilingualism: Spanish dominant speakers, balanced bilinguals and Basque dominant speakers. This replication shows that the percentage of use of estar with adjectives is lower than both the Spanish monolingual and Basque bilingual groups of Geeslin & Guijarro-Fuentes’ study. Also, it was shown that although no major differences were found between the three Basque bilingual groups, the linguistic variables were significant across groups. Precisely, susceptibility to change, stage level predicates, an individual frame of reference, and estar as the only copula allowed favor estar, as well as physical state, physical appearance, mental state, sensory characteristic and color adjectives.Ope