The sociolinguistic variation of palatalization: the case of Gernika-Lumo

It is a long time since dialectal researches have taken a new course, focused on urban spoken  varieties more than on rural varieties. Moreover, they focus on the interaction between independent  variables and  linguistic variables. Nevertheless, this is not the case of the Basque language, as there have  been few researches from this point of view. The aim of this contribution is to show that Basque is not an isolated case; as a living language it  has changed thr ough time and it is, indeed, changing nowadays. The focus of the  research is the variant of  the basque spoken in Gernika, and it  is based in 5 linguistic variables which present a sociolinguistic  variation of palatalization: variable  (is),  variable  (it),  v ariable  (il),  variables  (ind) and (ild) and  variable (i_V).  The realizations of these variables have been studied taking into account some independent variables  such as age, genre, parent’s origin and school.