It's kind of weird. In the Basque Country, the survival of the Basque language, linguistic conflict and multilingualism are spoken more than in many other places. On the other hand, the reflection of this at the academic level is not comparable. Many of Hiznet’s graduate students are educated in sociology and linguistics, and several other technicians are working on one or the other. No one has a degree in sociolinguistics, because there is no degree in sociolinguistics in the universities here. In the absence of faculty and branches of study, postgraduate. And this Innate Degree from the University of the Basque Country has not been born from scratch.

The sociologist Iñaki Martínez de Luna is now the director of Hiznet and when asked about Hiznet he went back to 1994. The UPV/EHU Leioa Campus hosted a language planning course. At that time, under the leadership of the Basque Government’s Department of Language Policy, Pello Salaburu, the Government paid for the project. When the government stopped paying, the course was cancelled.

In 2001, Basque Studies asked Martínez de Luna if he could organize a course again. The Foundation for the Purpose of Basque Learning was created at that time and the language planning course was launched with the name of Hiznet, invented by Olatz Olaso. Hiznet was launched by Olatz Olaso and Martinez de Luna. The latter, at first, had little hope of surviving long: “I thought, with a bit of luck, it would last for two or three years. The key was the work of a bridge with different institutions of the dialect. We tried to include everything I could say. Everyone did their best to get started.”

For the 2007-2008 academic year, after a series of efforts, Eusko Estudios managed to qualify Hiznet with the University of the Basque Country as a postgraduate, that is, to have an official degree, under the name of Language Planning Course.

The aim of the postgraduate course can be summed up in four characteristics: to provide students with basic knowledge of sociolinguistics, to provide them with tools for making language diagnoses or exams, to explain the general situation of the Basque language and to inform them about the different language plans in progress (municipal, Basque Government, educational, world of work...). The course is for Basque language technicians, professionals who work with Basque, associations or members of the Basque language, and those who intend to work in the Basque language.

The students’ profile hasn’t changed much in ten years; most of them have studied linguistics and some come from sociology. Mordoska are those who have just finished their university studies, but there are those who are working in teaching, companies, municipalities, translation and Basque associations, many of them technicians. Iñaki Martínez de Luna meets ten year old students: “Change has been in formation, many of those who are now know a lot and not before.” As for the teachers, they are people who are working or teaching in different fields, according to Martínez de Luna, “unfortunately not all those who serve are there, but all those who exist serve. They are very good.” The list of teachers who have just started is above.

Forums and wikis

The course is conducted over the Internet by the Intentions Foundation and the coordination work is currently carried out by the Labaka Session. On the virtual platform the students receive the lessons of the time and when they read the test, that is, the short-question-answer method is used to put the note to the student. Pass the test and do an exercise. In some subjects, the teacher may ask you what you think of such a situation or perhaps imagine a real situation, tell you to think you are a municipal technician and ask you to think and write about what you would do about such a situation. These exercises can be done individually, but they also work in groups through wikis. The other way of working that has gained strength in recent years is through forums. Thanks to the responses of one student and another on a topic, they form chains of reflection, as Martínez de Luna has told us, these exchanges in the forums are to be preserved because of their content level. To complement the requirements of the online forum, face-to-face sessions were introduced a few years ago and since then teachers and students meet four times a year at the headquarters of the Basque Summer University in Eibar.

The realistic projects

All the students know that by the end of the course they have to carry out the deepening project –above last year’s–. The Intentions Foundation offers them a list of topics, but you also have the opportunity to propose your own topic. Considering that many of the students are working, they often carry out projects that would serve to apply them to the workplace. As Labaka, the coordinator, told us, “when the project is finished, we ask them if we can post it on the website. Some say yes and others say no, for example, because the internal information of a particular company has been used or because they want to go deeper.” Martínez de Luna has defined these works as follows: “They are not esoteric works, they are works that are carried out in the ivory tower, they are works that want to respond to needs. They are interesting and some very good.”

Students want to put their plans into practice. Hiznet serves this purpose to help you find successful solutions in complicated language management.