“Fallo garrafal y común entre vascoparlantes:” attitudes and salience of grammatical gender agreement in Basque-Spanish contact

Abstract Non-standard gender agreement (N-SGA) is one of the linguistic features resulting from contact between Basque and Spanish in the Spanish spoken in the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC Spanish). The present study triangulates data from 73 participants (age range: 19–90), who completed three tasks: an exaggerated imitation task, a modified matched-guise task, and explicit questions regarding N-SGA in BAC Spanish. Statistical and thematic analyses reveal that N-SGA in BAC Spanish is associated with stereotypical perceptions of Basque native speakers from rural areas with limited access to education. Although results from the exaggerated imitation task suggest that N-SGA may not be the most salient feature associated with BAC Spanish, results from the explicit questions clearly reveal the social salience of N-SGA. Indeed, N-SGA is indexically linked to Basque native speakers with limited access to education (Fernández Ulloa, Teresa. 2006. Influencias morfosintácticas de la lengua vasca en el castellano actual. Oihenart 21. 73–99), despite other studies suggesting that this linguistic feature is also present among young native speakers of Basque who have had access to education (Basterretxea Santiso, Gorka. 2022. A triangulation study on gender agreement in Spanish by native Basque speakers. Revista Espanola de Linguistica 52(1). 7–37). As such, the study contributes to the field by modeling an approach to connecting formal grammatical constructs to their social significance in use, while also demonstrating the importance of the use of multiple methodologies to uncover nuances between use and perception.