On Linguistic Defiance

When the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco rose to power in 1936, it cracked down on Spain’s oldest language. 

Basque, tied to its characteristic ethnic group, had been a persistently spoken language in the country for thousands of years prior. Speakers of Basque saw both its speech and the unique cultural practices associated with it as a metric of identity neither belonging to Spain or nearby France, but one distinctly separate and additional to their national status. When Franco’s Nationalists took control, the language was a distinct cornerstone of a well-maintained, albeit marginalized group, kept alive over centuries by persistent local education efforts. 

In line with the regime’s fascist enforcement of cultural homogeny, Franco made Basque one of his primary targets. The language was rendered illegal on the basis that it was a sign of potential political rebellion and separatist movements, although in truth Basque was simply a threat to Franco’s intention of assimilating marginalized cultures into Spanish monodominance. Franco banned Basque speech and writing in the form of document erasure, publication censorship, and even measures as far as changing gravestones and birth registries to Spanish, enforcing a totalitarian grip on cultural expression. Ironically, though, this would only have the opposite effect.

Writers and educators became a surprisingly pivotal facet of resistance against the Francoist regime. Secret schools called ikastolas were founded as covert centers of Basque learning, and poets and musicians took to promoting the language through local gatherings and dispersed Basque publications. Ironically for Franco, Basque transformed from being a cultural component to an active means of resistance - and the language survived until Franco’s fall, when the new Spanish government took efforts to ensure its recovery. 

Basque - and other outlawed marginalized languages under Franco - are emblematic of the capabilities of language itself as an enduring and inseparable tool of identity, whether individual or truly collective. Language is simultaneously one of the simplest units of expression and the most difficult forms of it to separate, after all, and it is not just only the role of writers to preserve it but anyone that participates in the greater macrocosms of community and interaction. With perceived minutiae such as language, it’s important to keep an eye on how smaller details truly operate within a complex interactive whole.