Spotlight on Minority Languages – Basque

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Basque is a minority language spoken in parts of Spain and France.

  • Most Basque speakers, 93 percent, reside on the Spanish side of the border.
  • According to Ethnologue, the total number of speakers is 468,000.
  • Meanwhile Omniglot cites the number of speakers as 660,000.

The language is called ‘euskara’ in Basque.

There are five main dialects of Basque:

  • Biscayan or “Western”
  • Gipuzkoan or “Central”
  • Upper Navarrese
  • Navarro-Lapurdian
  • Souletin (Zuberoan)

Basque is a language isolate, meaning that it is not related to any other language.

  • However, Basque has been influenced by the surrounding Romance languages.

Basque is written using Latin script.

Basque is a SOV(subject-object-verb) language. To illustrate:

  • English: I ❤ U
  • Basque: I U ❤

Here is a video of someone speaking Basque:

For resources to learn the language, visit this page.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_language

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/basque.htm

Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2017. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.

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