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The Basque language is spoken by 806,000 Basques in all territories. Of these, 93.7% (756,000) are in the Spanish area of the Basque Country and the remaining 6.3% (50,000) are in the French portion. [1] Native speakers live in a contiguous area that includes parts of four Spanish provinces and the three "ancient provinces" in France.
Basque remained until the late-20th century a language steeped in oral tradition and little used in writing. In 2022, an inscription dated to the first quarter of the first century BCE, known as the Hand of Irulegi, was found to contain a supposed Basque word, providing the earliest attestation of the language to date. [5]
The Basque language, which was traditionally spoken by most of the region's population outside the BAB urban zone, is today rapidly losing ground to French. The French Basque Country's lack of self-government within the French state is coupled with the absence of official status for the Basque language in the region.
Standard Basque (Basque: euskara batua, lit. 'united Basque') 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.
The origin of the Basques and the Basque language is a controversial topic that has given rise to numerous hypotheses. 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.
On the coast, where the largest cities are located, the predominant language is French, for example, in the Bayonne-Anglet-Biarritz agglomeration, Basque is spoken by 10% of the population. However, in the rural interior of the Northern Basque Country, Basque is the predominant language, spoken by the majority of the population. [37]
In a victory for millions of Spaniards who speak a language other than Spanish, the European nation's Parliament allowed its national legislators to use Catalan, Basque and Galician for the first ...
The term Basque Country refers to a collection of regions inhabited by the Basque people, known as Euskal Herria in Basque language, and it is first attested as including seven traditional territories in Axular's literary work Gero (he goes on to suggest that Basque language is spoken "in many other places"), in the early 17th century.