The number of Basque new speakers has significantly increased during the last decades: nowadays, more than half of the young people of the Basque Country have learned Basque through formal education.   The linguistic identity of new speakers is lately being an interesting research area, both in Europe and in the Basque Country. In fact, these researches have shown that the use of language in the case of new speakers is related to the legitimacy that the speaker. And since legitimization is a process, in this work I study the conditions that exist in the world of Basque oral improvisation for the legitimization of young new speakers socialized in this area.   The Basque bertsolaritza or oral improvisation is essentially a communicative act, and practicing bertsolaritza means inevitably acquiring linguistic competence. On the other hand, bertsolaritza, as a social practice, generates an almost exclusively Basque-speaking linguistic field. And, it should be noted that, bertsolaritza has been until recently developed by and for native speakers.   This work is based on a five-year ethnographic research looking into linguistic itineraries and identities of young improvisers in the Northern Basque Country (through participant observation and 15 in-depth interviews).   I conclude that identifying oneself and being identified as an improviser is a lever that facilitates the legitimation of new speakers, but paradoxically, the process is limited by the canonical image of the improviser, to who the status of native speaker is symbolically attributed.  

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