2025/02/20 by Agurtzane Elordui, Jokin Aiestaran Etxabe, Samara Velte · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Basque language and culture studies
paper · doi:10.4324/9781032687087-7
openalex publication_date 2025/02/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Since 2019, the city of Pamplona has had its own popular carnival, called Iruinkokoa . The participants in Iruinkokoa are young people between 20 and 30 years old and they live in a sociolinguistic context in which Spanish is the dominant language. Iruinkokoa opens a brief window of exception into this sociolinguistic reality. It alters both the linguistic and social status quo within a carnivalesque logic of parody and satire, enabling an ephemeral semiotic landscape that becomes meaningful for those who participate in or feel identified with the local Basque community. Focusing on the ephemeral semiotization of space, this chapter shows how Iruinkokoa can demarcate spaces in Old Pamplona in which the identities of this young group are being defined and enacted, forms of authority are exerted, and ownership and entitlement are articulated and re-negotiated ( Blommaert 2012 , 20–21). It also reveals that, by relying mainly on the symbolic inversion typical of carnival, the participants of this popular festivity turn some areas of the Old Town into an agentive zone that allows them to showcase struggles about power and political conflicts involving the Basque language in Pamplona. The integration of an ethnographic study carried out around the Iruinkokoa performances of 2023 and 2024 has allowed us to understand how these processes develop.