The erosion of female allocutive form of address noketa in Ortzaize

Abstract

This fieldwork-based study seeks to analyse the use and more specially the decline of the female allocutive form of address noketa in Ortzaize, in Nafarroa Beherea (Lower Navarre). Based on a corpus made up of interviews with 18 residents of that place, the analysis of the use of the noketa familiar form of address hinges on two lines of research. On the one hand, from a morphological perspective, this work aims to analyse the variation of the verbal allocutive forms of the noketa collected from ten speakers, and specially the variants that would reflect its erosion. On the other hand, from a sociolinguistical point of view, the investigation plans on describing the accounts of practices and ideologies in relation to the noketa familiar form of address of the whole group of participants —including the younger generation—, and analysing their variation according to age. Indeed, the results obtained indicate that, from one generation to another, i) the influence exerted by sociolinguistic variants on the use of the noketa varies, ii) the usage domain narrows, but iii) that a gradual valorization of the noketa emerges in ideological discourses.