Vernaculars are increasingly used in media. They are considered to be stylistic resources to attract audiences and to construct media identities. That increase seems to be particularly significant in the case of youth media, which is also the case of Gaztea, a youth webradio station within the Basque public EITB group that we analyse in this work. Gaztea was created in the 90’s and, at that time, its whole production was in Standard Basque. In fact, promoting the newly created Standard Basque was considered to be Gaztea’s principal public service remit. Nowadays, however, the hegemony of that standard in Gaztea has been challenged by a more heteroglossic model in which vernacular speech is strategically used to empathize with the young Basque audience and to construct media identities. At the same time, though, the dominance of Standard Basque persists in Gaztea’s general stylistic design and practice: Vernaculars are excluded from writing, as well as from informative genres and serious and leading voices. Those are some of the conclusions of the research we have carried out on the distribution of vernaculars and Standard Basque across modes, genres and voices in Gaztea, and also from the information we have drawn from interviews with the managers of the media in question. Results from both data sources are important to understand the current ideological views Gaztea shares with young Basque people, as well as how Gaztea positions itself as a stylizer in the language ideological world of Basque youth.

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En el entorno digital la eficacia de las políticas de los medios minoritarios depende de su capacidad para atraer a usuarios jóvenes y hacerles participar. La participación es una cuestión relevante que vincula los objetivos de cualquier plan de normalización lingüística con una estrategia para el desarrollo de nuevos medios. Este trabajo analiza los patrones de participación de dos medios minoritarios públicos: BBC ALBA y EITB. Se centra en propuestas participativas exitosas comoFilmGyGaztea, que muestran pautas a seguir para el diseño de estrategias que ayuden a aumentar la visibilidad de los contenidos en lengua minoritaria en un mercado global.

In normative, academic, and informative works on Basque there are constant debates on the boundaries of what is meant by ‘authentic Basque’ and, alongside that, by ‘authentic Basque speaker’. In the current Basque media, these tensions are often addressed by means of creative practices, as in other minority contexts, by means of satire and other forms of humour, especially parody. In this work my subject is the character Jon Gotzon, who engages in parody on the radio programme Gaztea. Jon Gotzon is a hyperbolic and parodic stylisation of a new Basque speaker. He challenges ‘authentic’ and ‘native’ Basque-speaking styles in his syncretic bilingual stylisation and parodic discourse. In this research, I study the way this parody takes advantages of carnivalesque strategies in order to question fixed ideological hierarchies on Basqueness, and I explore the ideological positions Jon Gotzon's parody reveals, especially with respect to hybrid identities in the Basque community. (Parody, stylisation, authenticity, minority media, Basque, humour)*