The findings from a previous study on the requests of a trilingual child aged five showed that the child used fewer politeness markers when speaking to English speaking trilingual children from the Basque Country than to English-speaking children from Britain (Barnes 2001). It was suggested that this directness could be due to pragmatic transfer from Basque into English, since Spanish has been shown to be a direct language and Basque appears to be more direct than Spanish. The study, although very limited and related to trilingualism and English, attracted the attention of the Basque media possibly reflecting public interest in the topic of whether or not Basque is more direct than other languages and maybe even concern as to whether Basque children were not as polite as they might be. As a result of this interest it was decided to conduct further research into the area, and another study was carried out to find out the extent to which a sample of Basque children used politeness markers in Basque in their requests.

The study involved seventeen children, nine girls and eight boys, in the 5^th year of Primary (aged ten and eleven) in a Model D ikastola. The children were asked to fill out the part spoken by a child in a written discourse completion test consisting of ten dialogues. It has been shown that such tests obtain similar written utterances in native speakers to those that would have been spoken (Rintell and Mitchell 1989). The dialogues were contextualised in situations which were realistic for Basque children such as asking to play with a friend’s ball, to borrow a pen cil sharpener or friend’s bike or asking if the friend could tell them the homework and lend their book. In relation to making requests to adults, the children had to ask for a glass of water in a bar, ask their teacher to let them in during break-time to get their swaps, ask the caretaker who was closing up the sports centre to let them back in to get their coat, ask a stranger for the time, ask their grandfather for some pocket money and ask their father to let them stay out later than usual. It was expected that the children would use fewer expressions of politeness to their peers and more to adults, especially if the adult was a stranger and the request involved a high degree of mitigation, that is to say, that the performance of the favour requested meant inconveniencing the interlocutor. Such cases where the request may inconvenience the interlocutor are termed high constraint.

The findings did in fact confirm this, and also revealed some interesting facts about the politeness of the requests of the children. With regard to the forms used, all the children invariably used the interrogative form VERB + iko al didazu (will you ......for me?) in their requests rather than the imperative, which was only occasionally found. Use of the past form VERB + ziko al zenidake (would you ?) to form a conditional downgraded the request making it more polite and was occasionally found. The use of modals with speaker dominance (can I?) was found in requests with high degrees of mitigation (such as asking to go back into the sports centre, asking the father to stay out late), e.g. joan al naiteke, hartu al dezaket + justification, sartu al naiteke, joan al naiteke, Aita egon al naiteke, mesedez egon al naiteke.

Interesting patterns emerged in relation to the politeness marker mesedez. Nearly half of the questions included the word mesedez (please) and only one child never used mesedez. It was found that some children rarely used mesedez whilst others almost always did, suggesting that the latter group had been explicitly taught at home (rather than at school) to use mesedez as a politeness formula. One particular child consistently used the pattern mesedez + VERB+ iko al didazu + justification in her requests, again suggesting that this was a politeness formula she had been taught. The same was true of VERB + iko al zenidake which tended to be used by individuals Three of the children had one foreign parent and all of them made frequent use of mesedez. One of these children, in addition to using mesedez also used zenidake in the high constraint request for water. Some children made use of an imperative phrase mitigated by mesedez. Of the children who used mesedez, there was a tendency for most of them to use mesedez in final position in the utterance and to always do so whilst some others preferred the initial position. Other children varied the position of mesedez in the utterance. When occasionally used by a child mesedez in initial position tended to suggest higher constraint, in other words that the child was trying to be more polite in order to get what they wanted. All of the children, except three, used mesedez when asking the bar-tender for a glass of water. Even one particularly direct child used mesedez for this request. This is not something that the author has frequently observed in real life where the preferred form has appeared to be an imperative ura or eman ura, the directness of which motivated in part the present study.

There was a clear tendency for the children to use conditionals and more polite forms with adults or for favours with a high constraint. For example, the request in which the most variety of polite forms was found was the one to the father, asking to be allowed to stay out later than usual. These included use of mesedez and mesedez aita in initial position in the utterance along with conditional forms. The youngsters clearly recognised the importance of asking properly if permission was to be obtained. The requests to adults for a glass of water, to open the sports centre and to tell the time were also more polite than the requests to peers. In the case of asking a stranger for the time a number of children preceded their requests with markers such as barkatu (excuse me) or aizu. Requests often included the name of the person who was being addressed, usually in initial position. This was found particularly with aita (father) and aitona (Grandpa) but occasionally in final position such as zer ordu da andrea? (what is the time ma’am) Interestingly the teacher did not seem to inspire distance as a higher level of informality was found with her than with other adults, even family members like the father and grandfather.

The high constraint requests were often justified by the giving of a reason. This was particularly found amongst the girls. The girls also tended to be more polite in general than the boys, who used more imperatives, less mesedez and fewer conditionals.

In sum, it can be seen that this group of Basque children were aware of the importance of politeness. Although every attempt was made to ensure that the children did not realise that they were being tested on their politeness there is a remote possibility that they were aware of this. Nevertheless this does not detract from the findings that demonstrate that a variety of forms are recognised as polite by most of the children and they use them according to the constraint imposed by the status, distance or not of the interlocutor and the degree of inconvenience likely to be caused by the request. It would be interesting to carry out research on further groups of Basque children and compare them with samples from Spanish and English children, for example, to see if Basque children are more direct. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the children in our sample are bilingual and therefore may show influence from Spanish in their levels of politeness. Unfortunately, as there are no monolingual Basque speakers, we cannot easily separate the two languages at a pragmatic level to examine the directness of Basque without also considering Spanish.