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Modern Basque, a descendant or close relative of Aquitanian and Proto-Basque, is the only pre-Indo-European language that is extant in western Europe. The Basques have therefore long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe. The main hypotheses about the origin of the Basques are:
Among European languages, this polypersonal agreement is found only in Basque, some languages of the Caucasus (especially the Kartvelian languages), Mordvinic languages, Hungarian, and Maltese (all non-Indo-European). The ergative–absolutive alignment is also rare among European languages—occurring only in some languages of the Caucasus ...
Recent Basque Government policies aim to change this pattern, as they are viewed as potential threats against mainstream usage of the minority tongue. [34] The Basque language is thought to be a genetic language isolate in contrast with other European languages, vast majority of which belong to the broad Indo-European language family.
Basque (/ b æ s k, b ɑː s k /; [1] euskara [eus̺ˈkaɾa]) is a pre-Indo-European language spoken in the Basque Country, extending over a strip along eastern areas of the Bay of Biscay in Spain and France, straddling the western Pyrenees.
The Basque language shows few certain Celtic or other Indo-European loans, other than those transmitted via Latin or Romance in historic times. Basques as an Iberian subgroup: Based on occasional use by early Basques of the Iberian alphabet and Julius Caesar's description of the Aquitanians as Iberians.
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, ... Estonian etc.) remain, as does Basque, a pre-Indo-European isolate.
Of the approximately 45 million Europeans speaking non-Indo-European languages, most speak languages within either the Uralic or Turkic families. Still smaller groups — such as Basque ( language isolate ), Semitic languages ( Maltese , c. 0.5 million), and various languages of the Caucasus — account for less than 1% of the European ...
The 449 Indo-European languages identified in the SIL estimate, 2018 edition, [1] are mostly living languages. If all the known extinct Indo-European languages are added, they number more than 800 or close to one thousand. This list includes all known Indo-European languages, living and extinct.