Family in Basque

What is the genetic affiliation of your language?

Basque is spoken at the western end of the Pyrenees, along the coast of the Bay of Biscay. The Basque-speaking region runs from the city of Bayonne in France west to the city of Bilbao in Spain, a distance of about 100 miles; it extends inland about 30 miles, not quite reaching the city of Pamplona.

According to the 1991 census about 660,000 people speak Basque. Fewer than 80,000 of these people are on the French side of the frontier, which runs through the Basque Country; the rest of Basque speakers are on the Spanish side.

The Basque language is a language whose origin is still somewhat puzzling. The fact that it is not an Indo-European language, and shows no resemblance to languages in neighboring countries, has led to the formulation of a variety of hypotheses to explain its existence. One of the most likely hypotheses argues that the Basque language developed "in situ", in the land of the primitive Basques. That theory is supported by the discovery of some Basque-type skulls in Neolithic sites, which ruled out the thesis of immigration from other areas.

The favorite candidates for relatives of Basque have long been the several groups of Caucasian languages and the Afro-Asiatic family (especially the Berber language of North Africa). People have also tried to connect Basque with Iberian, Pictish, Etruscan, Minoan, Sumerian, Burushaski, Niger-Congo, Khoisan, Uralic, Dravidian, Munda, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Egyptian, the Finno-Ugric languages, the Semitic languages, with Burushaski (another language with no known relatives, spoken in the Himalayas) - in fact, with almost all the languages, living and dead, and even with languages of the Pacific and of North America, even Indo-European. But in vain. Basque absolutely cannot be shown to be related to any other language at all: obviously the relatives that Basque once had have died out without trace.

According to the current literature descriptions (see references below) and Linguist List discussions (http://linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-1641.html#1) the ancestral form of Basque, Aquitanian, was introduced into western Europe at least thousands or maybe tens of thousands of years ago. Nobody knows. Whereas all the other modern languages of Western Europe arrived much later. For most of the time when Western Europe has been inhabited, writing was unknown and hence there are no records of the languages spoken. In the second half of the first millennium BC, writing was introduced into southern and eastern Spain by the Phoenicians and the Greeks, but it didn't reach the ancestral Basques farther north. It was only the Roman conquest of Gaul (France) and Spain in the first century BC that brought writing to the Basques, and only from that time there are written records of the Basques.

The various Indo-European languages have been spreading across Europe from east to west for thousands of years. While spreading across Europe, they gradually displaced most of the earlier languages, which died out. By the time the Romans arrived, an ancestral form of Basque, Aquitanian, was the only pre-Indo-European language still surviving in Gaul. Uniquely among the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe, Basque has "refused to die out" and has survived down to the present day.

1. J. I. Hualde, J.A. Lakarra & R.L. Trask (eds.) "Towards a History of the Basque Language". Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 131, 1995
2. A. Tovar "The Basque Language". Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957.
3. World Wide Web Pages:

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Revised January 28, 1999