This paper presents the influence of Standard Basque and other Basque dialects in the position of the demonstratives in the Basque Biscayan varieties. It is a diatopic and sociolinguistic research as we have two external factors: age and geographic area. Precisely, it shows the results of syntactic differentiation between elder (60-80) and youth (20-30) from 20 localities.
Basque was not standardized until 1968 and it was forbidden during Franco's dictatorship (until 1975) so its immersion in education is very recent. Therefore, these two generations have different education patterns: older people were educated in Spanish and never studied Basque as a subject, so they get Basque naturally at home or in the street and Standard Basque hardly influenced in their speech. On the other hand, young people are the first ones that received education totally in Standard Basque at school, so they have been in contact with it since they started going to school and they are familiarized with it from the very early ages of childhood.
As this research shows, Standard-dialect convergence and the levelling among dialects in the Basque language are closely related to age-based sociolinguistic variation. Nevertheless, it is also related to geolinguistics, as the influence does not affect equaly to all the localities.
A questionnaire was prepared to collect different parts of language such as morphology, phonology, lexicon and syntax and 100 questions were done to 2 female informants in each locality. All data was analysed by Praat acoustic software and DiaTech (Aurrekoetxea et al. 2012) and SPSS statistic programs.
This paper is focused in (hau) variable (Ensunza 2015), exactly in the change between generations and localities according to the position of the demonstrative pronouns. In most of the varieties of Basque and also in Standard Basque this demonstrative word follows the noun ('mutil hauek', NOUN-DEM.PL. ), but in Biscayan varieties the demonstrative preceds the noun ('honek mutilek', DEM.PL-NOUN.PL). Nevertheless, in Biscayan varieties linguistic change is happening but is this change, as Auer (1998) described, a vertical or a horizontal levelling phenomena? This is an example of a dialect in diaglosia (Bellmann 1998: 24) situation.
