Technical sheet

Name of the language in Basque : Euskara

Spoken in: Spain in the Basque provinces (Alava, Biskaia and Gipuzkoa) and Navarre.

by around 580.000 people

Particular features: In ancient times, the Basque language - locally named Euskara, Euskera or Vasco - was spoken in Aquitaine, Rioja and the central Pyrenees. There is no clear information on its origins, but it does not belong to the Indo-European group of languages. The favoured hypothesis is that Basque is the only survivor of a family of languages spoken in western Europe and almost completely wiped out with the Indo-European invasions of the 13th century B.C. For this reason it is regarded as an isolated language, i.e. a language that bears no relation with any other. For almost 40 years, with the prohibitions and criminalisations of Franco's regime, Basque was on the verge of disappearing completely. Only in the early 1960s did it start reviving, and with the 1978 Constitution it regained its official status in the Basque Country, where it slowly re-entered public life. It is unusual to note a 10% overlap between Basque and the Berber dialects of North Africa and a 6% overlap between Basque and the northern Caucasian languages. This suggests a possible connection with pre-Afro-Asiatic and Caucasian languages. In fact, a recent theory that is slowly taking hold states that Basque is the western descendant of an ancient Dene-Caucasian language widespread in Eurasia, in North America and perhaps in North Africa. This theory is partially backed by genetic investigations.

Code ISO639-1: eu

encoding: iso-8859-1, windows-1252

script: Latin-1

Aa, Bb, [Cc], Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, Hh, Ii, Jj, Kk, Ll, LLll, Mm, Nn, Ññ, Oo, Pp, [Qq], Rr (RRrr), Ss, Tt, TSts, TXtx, TZtz, Uu, [Vv], [Ww], Xx, [Yy], Zz

Main search engines:
http://www.google.com/intl/eu
http://dmoz.org/World/Euskara
http://www.paisvasco.com

Other sites: Aurki, Jalgi, Nafarroa