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1. Introduction The western Pyrenean region, where Basque has coexisted for centuries with Romance varieties such as Gascon, Aquitanian, French, and Spanish, provides an exceptional ecological niche for investigating how languages evolve through contact. Basque—a non-Indo-European isolate with complex agglutinative morphology—has long interacted with fusional Romance systems, creating a rich environment for structural adaptation and innovation. This study interprets the Basque–Romance contact zone as an evolutionary system in which grammatical structures replicate, mutate, and stabilize under communicative and cognitive pressures. Rather than merely describing "atypical" morphological borrowings, this paper explores how interaction between distinct linguistic populations leads to long-term, systemic evolutionary change. 2. Methodology The analysis integrates diachronic and synchronic evidence from three distinct sources to map structural shifts: Historical Corpora: Onomastic and textual data from Gascony, Aquitaine, and Navarre (9th–14th centuries), documenting early morphological borrowing and auxiliary innovations. Comparative Romance Data: Early French, Gascon, and Occitan corpora demonstrating phonological and structural shifts correlated with Basque contact. Contemporary Bilingual Data: Speech from Basque-Spanish bilinguals sourced from the COREC and COSER corpora, supplemented by qualitative interviews highlighting ongoing morphosyntactic evolution. To ensure representativeness, variables were selected based on typological salience—specifically, features showing structural divergence from standard Romance varieties and isomorphism with Basque constructions. This strategy successfully distinguishes contact-induced evolution from internal language drift. 3. Results The results highlight three primary areas of contact-induced change: Morphological Replication: Medieval Gascon and Aquitanian place names show the diffusion of Basque-derived suffixes (-os/-osse, -etz, -ona), seen in Léonosse, Orthez, and Bayonne. These bound affixes, typically highly resistant to borrowing, were integrated into Romance, proving that morphology can replicate when supported by structural accommodation. Auxiliary Restructuring: In Gascon, the use of ésser with unergative verbs (que soi anat, 'I went') diverges from standard Romance and mirrors Basque’s izan/ukan alternation. Medieval Navarrese Spanish displays a parallel reorganization of its haber/ser alternation, revealing adaptive restructuring toward cross-linguistic compatibility. Modern Syntactic Adaptation: Modern Basque-influenced Spanish exhibits continuing structural evolution. The clitic system shows animacy-based reanalysis (differential object marking) and object pronoun omission (No O encuentro), directly reflecting Basque’s argument encoding. As Basque gains prestige in the 21st century, these forms are shifting from individual usage (parole) toward stable markers of bilingual identity. 4. Discussion & Conclusion Across French, Gascon, and Spanish, the influence of Basque reveals a continuum of contact-driven grammatical evolution. This interface models linguistic coevolution, where interacting systems adapt reciprocally. Structural innovations survive not just through frequency, but when supported by the psychological and social prestige of the source language. The western Pyrenees thus provide a living laboratory for studying the evolution of grammar—a setting where forms compete, converge, and stabilize. Viewing these processes through an evolutionary lens clarifies that so-called "irregular" patterns are natural outcomes of replication and selection within mixed linguistic ecologies.
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