Standard variety of Basque, heavily based on Central Basque
Basque dialects, according to the 21st-century classification by Koldo Zuazo
Western (Biscayan)
Central (Gipuzkoan)
(Upper) Navarrese
Navarro-Lapurdian
Zuberoan
other Basque areas ca 1850 (Bonaparte)
Standard Basque (Basque: euskara batua or simply batua) is a standardised version of the Basque language, developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s, which nowadays is the most widely and commonly spoken Basque-language version throughout the Basque Country. Heavily based on the literary tradition of the central areas (Gipuzkoan and Lapurdian dialects), it is the version of the language that is commonly used in education at all levels, from elementary school to university, on television and radio, and in the vast majority of all written production in Basque.[1]
It is also used in common parlance by new speakers that have not learnt any local dialect, especially in the cities, whereas in the countryside, with more elderly speakers, people remain attached to the natural dialects to a higher degree, especially in informal situations; i.e. Basque traditional dialects are still used in the situations where they always were used (native Basque speakers speaking in informal situations), while batua has conquered new fields for the Basque language: the formal situations (where Basque was seldom used, apart from religion) and a lot of new speakers that otherwise would not have learned Basque.
The standard version of Basque was created in the 1970s by the Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language), mainly based on the central Basque dialect and on the written tradition. Having been for centuries pressured by acculturation from both Spanish and French, and particularly under the rule of Franco in which the Basque language was prohibited and came closer to extinction in Spain, the Academy felt the need to create a unified dialect of Basque, so that the language had a greater chance of survival.
The 1968 Arantzazu Congress took place in the sanctuary of Arantzazu, a shrine perched in the highlands of Gipuzkoa and a dynamic Basque cultural focus, where the basic guidelines were laid down for achieving that objective in a systematic way (lexicon, morphology, declension and spelling). A further step was taken in 1973 with a proposal to establish a standard conjugation.[2]
The debate arising from this new set of standard language rules (1968–1976) did not prevent Standard Basque from becoming increasingly accepted as the Basque standard language in teaching, the media, and administration (1976–1983), within the context of burgeoning regional government (Statute of Autonomy of the Basque Country, 1979; Improvement of the Charter of Navarre, 1982).
Reasons for basing on the central dialect
Here are the reasons for basing the standardised Basque on the central dialect, the Gipuzkoan, according to Koldo Zuazo:[3]
Linguistic: the central dialect is the meeting point of all Basque speakers. The westernmost dialect, Biscayan, is difficult to understand for the speakers from other dialects; and the same occurs with the easternmost dialect, Zuberoan.
Demolinguistic: the central area and the western area were in 1968 and still are the zones in which most Basque speakers live. Moreover, it was and is in Gipuzkoa and the surrounding areas that Basque is strongest.
Sociolinguistic: since the 18th century, the central dialect, more precisely, the Beterri sub-dialect, is most prestigious.
Economic and cultural: Bilbao is certainly the most important Basque city, but it is not Basque speaking. The same is true for Gasteiz, Iruñea, and Baiona-Angelu-Biarritz. This left Gipuzkoa, the only Basque province with a multipolar structure and no powerful city.
Koldo Zuazo (a scholar and supporter of Basque dialects, especially his own, Biscayan) said that "taking all these characteristics into account, I think that it is fair and sensible having based the euskara batua on the central Basque dialect, and undoubtedly that is the reason of the Batua being so successful".[5]
Usage
In the 21st century, almost all texts in Basque are published in the standard variety, i.e. administrative texts, education textbooks, media publications,[6][7][8][9] literary texts, etc.
The most widely used ISO 639-2 code is the EU code that always refers to standard Basque. ISO 639-3 code is EUS. The Eu-ES and Eu-FR codes have also been used, but the standard Basque used in Spain and France forms just one language, and most software translators prefer the EU code.[10][bettersourceneeded]
Nowadays all school materials and all the written productions of teachers and students are always written in the standard form of Basque.
Different university studies are currently offered in (standard) Basque at some universities in Spain, France and the USA.[11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
Advantages of Standard Basque
According to Koldo Zuazo,[18] there are six main advantages that euskara batua has brought to the Basque language:
Basque-speakers can easily understand each other when they use batua. When they use traditional dialects, difficulties in understand one another increase, especially between speakers of non-central dialects.
Before the creation of batua, Basque speakers had to turn to Spanish or French to discuss modern topics or work subjects: Euskara Batua gives them a suitable tool to do so.
Batua has made more adult people than ever able to learn the Basque language.
The geographic reach of the Basque language has been in retreat for centuries. Old maps reveal that Basque was formerly spoken in a significantly larger area than today. However, now, thanks to the euskaltegis and ikastolas, thanks to primary schools, high schools and universities that teach batua, the Basque-speaking area is expanding anew, as Basque speakers can now be found in any part of the Basque Country, and at times even outside it.
Batua has given prestige to Basque because it can now be used in high-level usages of society.
Basque speakers are more united: since batua was made, the internal boundaries of the language have also been broken, and the sense of being a community is more alive. With a stronger speakers' community, Basque language becomes stronger.
All of those advantages have been widely recognised and so have been used by Badihardugu, an organisation supporting the traditional dialects.[19]
Criticism
Standard Basque has been described as an "artificial language" by its critics,[who?] a "plastified Euskeranto",[20][21] as it is at times hardly mutually intelligible with the dialects at the extremes (namely the westernmost one or Biscayan, and the easternmost one or Zuberoan). Moreover, Basque purists (such as Oskillaso and Matías Múgica) have argued that its existence and proliferation will kill the historic and genuine Basque languages. Others argue that standard Basque has safeguarded the future of a language that competes with French and Spanish.
Research by the Euskaltzaindia shows that Basque is growing most in the areas where euskara batua has been introduced and taught in preference of local dialects. Indeed, this has permitted a revival in the speaking of Basque, since many of the current elder generations cannot speak the language in part due to the suppression of public use during most of Francisco Franco's dictatorship.
Another point of contention was the spelling of ⟨h⟩. Northeastern dialects pronounce it as an aspiration while the rest do not use it. Standard Basque requires it in writing but allows a silent pronunciation. Opponents complained that many speakers would have to relearn their vocabulary by rote.
The mainstream opinion accepts the batua variant because of the benefits it has brought:
The benefits that the Academy’s standard has brought to Basque society are widely recognized. First of all, it made possible for Basque speakers to discuss any topic in their language. Secondly, it has eliminated the (sometimes serious) obstacles that previously existed in communication between speakers from different areas of the Basque Country. At the same time, euskara batua is still nobody’s "real" native language, a situation that not uncommonly creates feelings of linguistic insecurity, together with a willingness to accept external norms of linguistic use.
On the other hand, some Basque authors or translators such as Matías Múgica charcterize batua works as a mere pidgin with a severe loss of spontaneity and linguistic quality over the traditional dialects.[22]
The relation between the Standard Basque and the local dialects is well summarized as follows by William Haddican:[23]
Batua was not primarily intended as a replacement for local dialects, but rather to complement them as a written standard and for inter-dialectal communication. Nevertheless, dialect speakers often view Batua as more objectively "correct" than their own dialect.
The following dialects were the pre-batua Basque and make up the colloquial or casual register of Basque, the euskara batua being the formal one. They were created in the Middle Ages from a previously quite unified Basque language and diverged from each other since then because of the administrative and political division that happened in the Basque Country.[25][26]
They are spoken in the Spanish and French Basque regions. Standard Basque was then created using Gipuzkoan as a basis, also bringing scattered elements from the other dialects. They are typically used in the region after which they are named, but have many linguistic similarities.
Basque is the last surviving Paleo-European language spoken indigenously in Europe, predating the Indo-European languages of the Bronze Age invasion of Europe from the Black Sea by pastoralists whose descendant languages dominate the continent today. Basque is spoken by the Basques and other residents of the Basque Country, a region that straddles the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. Linguistically, Basque is classified as a language isolate, as a relationship to any of the other known extinct pre-Indo-European languages of Europe has not been established, nor is it related to the later arriving Indo-European languages. The Basques are indigenous to, and primarily inhabit, the Basque Country. The Basque language is spoken by 28.4% (751,500) of Basques in all territories. Of these, 93.2% (700,300) are in the Spanish area of the Basque Country and the remaining 6.8% (51,200) are in the French portion.
Euskaltzaindia is the official academic language regulatory institution which watches over the Basque language. It conducts research, seeks to protect the language, and establishes standards of use. It is known in Spanish as La Real Academia de la Lengua Vasca and in French as Académie de la Langue Basque.
The Basque alphabet is a Latin alphabet used to write the Basque language. It consists of 27 letters.
The French Basque Country, or Northern Basque Country, is a region lying on the west of the French department of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. Since 1 January 2017, it constitutes the Basque Municipal Community presided over by Jean-René Etchegaray.
Biscayan, sometimes Bizkaian, is a dialect of the Basque language spoken mainly in Biscay, one of the provinces of the Basque Country of Spain.
Gipuzkoan is a dialect of the Basque language spoken mainly in the central and eastern parts of the province of Gipuzkoa in Basque Country and also in the northernmost part of Navarre. It is a central dialect of Basque according to the traditional dialectal classification of the language based on research carried out by Lucien Bonaparte in the 19th century. He included varieties spoken in the Sakana and Burunda valleys also in the Gipuzkoan dialect, however this approach has been disputed by modern Basque linguists.
Navarro-Labourdin or Navarro-Lapurdian is a Basque dialect spoken in the Lower Navarre and Labourd (Lapurdi) former provinces of the French Basque Country. It consists of two dialects in older classifications, Lower Navarrese and Labourdin. It differs somewhat from Upper Navarrese spoken in the Peninsular Basque Country.
Souletin or Zuberoan is the Basque dialect spoken in Soule, France. Souletin is marked by influences from Occitan, especially in the lexicon. Another distinct characteristic is the use of xuka verb forms, a form of address including in third person verbs the interlocutor marker embedded in the auxiliary verb: jin da → jin düxü.
Although the first instances of coherent Basque phrases and sentences go as far back as the San Millán glosses of around 950, the large-scale damage done by periods of great instability and warfare, such as the clan wars of the Middle Ages, the Carlist Wars and the Spanish Civil War, led to the scarcity of written material predating the 16th century.
Basque dialects are linguistic varieties of the Basque language which differ in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar from each other and from Standard Basque. Between six and nine Basque dialects have been historically distinguished:
Resurrección María de Azkue was an influential Basque priest, musician, poet, writer, sailor and academic. He made several major contributions to the study of the Basque language and was the first head of the Euskaltzaindia, the Academy of the Basque Language. In spite of some justifiable criticism of an imbalance towards unusual and archaic forms and a tendency to ignore the Romance influence on Basque, he is considered one of the greatest scholars of Basque to date.
Erromintxela is the distinctive language of a group of Romani living in the Basque Country, who also go by the name Erromintxela. It is sometimes called Basque Caló or Errumantxela in English; caló vasco, romaní vasco, or errominchela in Spanish; and euskado-rromani or euskado-romani in French. Although detailed accounts of the language date to the end of the 19th century, linguistic research began only in the 1990s.
Salazarese is the Basque dialect of the Salazar Valley of Navarre, Spain.
Gorka Aulestia Txakartegi is Spanish Basque literary historian and lexicographer.
Koldo Zuazo is a Basque linguist, professor at the University of the Basque Country and specialist in Basque language dialectology and sociolinguistics.
Alavese is an extinct dialect of the Basque language spoken formerly in Álava, one of the provinces of the Basque Country of Spain. The modern-day communities of Aramaio and Legutio along the northern border with Biscay do not speak the Alavese dialect but a variant of the Biscayan dialect instead and while overall some 25% of people in Álava today are Basque speakers, the majority of these are speakers of Standard Basque who acquired Basque via the education system or moved there from other parts of the Basque Country.
Mikel Zalbide Elustondo is a Basque linguist and sociolinguist.
Bingen Zupiria is a Spanish politician affiliated with the Basque National Party. As of 28 November 2016, he serves as Minister of Culture and Language Policy in the Basque Government. Between 2016 and 2020, he served in this position in the Second Urkullu Government led by Iñigo Urkullu and as of 8 September 2020, he serves in this position in the Third Urkullu Government. He also serves as government spokesperson.
16th-century Basque literature begins with three authors considered classics: Joan Perez de Lazarraga, Bernard Etxepare and Joanes Leizarraga. In the manuscript of the first of them, discovered in 2004, the influence of the traditional court lyric, the Italian novela pastoril and the popular Basque templates can be observed. In the case of Etxepare, often compared to the Archpriest of Hita, the influence of French literature has been mentioned. Regarding Leizarraga, translator into Basque of the New Testament and other works on religious themes, he stands out for his attempt to find a unified language—a concern of many of the later authors—and for his use of cultured verbal forms and compound sentences, nonexistent in written literature up to that time.
Jon Gomez Garai is a Spanish singer, musician and TV presenter.
↑ Zuazo, Koldo (2008). Euskara normaltzeko bideak(PDF). Euskalgintza XXI. Mendeari Buruz. Euskaltzaindiaren nazioarteko XV. Biltzarra (in Basque). Euskaltzaindia. pp.3–13.
↑ "Ezaugarri hauek guztiok kontuan izanda, zuzena eta zentzuzkoa begitantzen zait Euskara Batua erdialdeko euskalkian oinarritu izana, eta horren ondorioa da, ezbairik gabe, lortu duen arrakasta."[4]
↑ William Haddican is a lecturer in the Department of Language of Language and Linguistic Science of the University of York, whose research focuses on language change, syntax and language contact particularly as they relate to Basque and dialects of English. See his pageArchived 2009-05-30 at the Wayback Machine in the website of the University of York (retrieved 2010-09-03).
↑ Mitxelena, Koldo (1981). "Lengua común y dialectos vascos"[Common language and Basque dialects](PDF). Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca Julio de Urquijo (in Spanish). 15: 291–313 – via University of the Basque Country.
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