Euskara: The Basque Language

Also known as Euskera, the Basque Language is a real mystery.

Once again, we go back to the same useful page in order to get information about the Basque language.

Euskara

Euskara, the language of the Basques, is an isolate language. It is not related to any other language at all, despite serious (and less serious) attempts to find similarities between Basque and other linguistic families or given languages.

It is a peculiar language, with distinctive lexical background and grammar. Being isolate and relatively strange (compared to other European languages), Basque is supposed to be extremely difficult. But this is not true. Larry Trask, an English linguist that commands Basque perfectly, writes: "In fact, Basque is a rather easy language to pick up, while mastering it is no more difficult than mastering any other language. The pronunciation is easy, the spelling is regular, there is no grammatical gender, there are no noun-classes or verb-classes, and there are no irregular nouns and hardly any irregular verbs". A curious fact about Basque is that even pidginized forms of it have evolved far from the Basque Country, for instance in Iceland (more info at another page of GeoNative).

Other features may shock you, for instance: pluri-personal verbs, the 3-number system (singular, plural and indefinite), allocutive speech, ergative construction, the 20-or-so declination cases (very easy to learn: they are just strictly regular postpositions), particular word order, positional nouns... Many of these features are strange to European language speakers, but are not that rare among the world's languages.

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