Basque language

 Basque (Euskara) is one of a multitude of non-Indo-European languages with a home in Continental Europe. These include Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Sami, and Maltese, the oldest European language still in use today, and is assumed to be a descendant of Aquitaine, an ancient language spoken around the Pyrenees, dating back as far back as 200 BC. The Basque folks have been isolated from the rest of Europe for thousands of years, mainly due to its dense forests and mountain ranges, and landforms. This is probably why, unlike the rest of the ancient European languages, the Basque language has survived. The Basques are assumed to have inhabited their present territory long before the Celts and the Romans invaded their lands. Their culture goes back to the Palaeolithic era, which makes their language the most ancient in Europe. The name Basque comes from the Latin 'foresters' Vascones. Vasconia was the Roman name for the western Pyrenees.

Basque spoken by 659,000 individuals in the Basque Country (Euskadi), an autonomous community in the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain, South-West France, and the autonomous society of Navarre in Spain. Basque is a statutory regional language in the Basque Country of Spain, where most Basque speakers also speak Castilian. It has no official recognition in the Basque Country of France, where many people speak French as well.

Dialectics

·         Guipuzcoan

·         Alto Navarro Septentrional (High Navarrese, Upper Navarran)

·         Alto Navarro Meridional, Biscayan (Vizcaino)

·         Roncalese

·         Avalan

·         Souletin spoken in France

All dialects, except Souletin, are mutually intelligible. Batua ('unified' in Basque) is the most widely used standardized dialect. It's educated in most schools and used in the mainstream press. It is typically referred to as the Basque Standard. Even though regional variants are sometimes favoured for oral communication, there is a deep desire to use the unified Batua standard.

Basque is not an Indo-European language and is not linked to any other known language spoken today. It is known as an isolated language, its roots are not in Latin, or in any other Romance or Germanic languages. Over the years, the Basque language has, of course, been impacted by the Romance language in terms of most of its vocabulary, but its framework and sentence structure are still entirely different.

The first book in Basque was published in 1545, although there are carvings in Basque dating back to the Roman period. There has been no standard orthography for centuries, and the Basque has been written with the Latin alphabet complemented by symbols that represent sounds not present in the Romance languages. In 1964, the Royal Basque Language Academy introduced a new standardized orthography, which is now uniformly used. Only 27% of the population in the Southern Province speak Basque.

Basque may be the language of the Basque Country, but less than half of the population speaks Basque. This is in comparison to some of Spain's other languages, such as Catalan, where some 73% of the population speaks it and around 95% understands it. There are approximately 800,000 Basque native speakers, although there are also a significant number of Basque native speakers in other parts of Europe as well as in the Americas due to migration.

First, before the Basque Country was becoming distant and outsiders arrived, people began to communicate in other languages, such as Spanish and French. Second, during the Franco regime (1939-1975), languages other than Spanish were severely suppressed. It was prohibited to speak Basque in schools and prohibited in the media, which led to a reduction in the number of individuals able to speak the language. However, efforts have been made in recent years to revive the language and encourage Basque-language learning, so that numbers are increasing.

It is said that the Basque language is very difficult to learn, and there is a myth that sometimes the Devil was trying to learn the language because that he could decide which of the Basques was going to Hell. After seven years of trying to learn, he finally gave up because he still couldn't understand!