*music plays*
Hello everyone, welcome to the Langfocus channel and my name is Paul.
Yes that's right, today the Langfocus channel has reached 50,000 subscribers.
This is a big day for me.
When I started my channel, I always had the dream in mind, the goal in mind, of reaching 50,000 subscribers,
and I thought that was kind of the pinnacle. Now, it seems that is an achievable goal, and ...
we'll see how much further I can get than fifty thousand
But for now I have achieved my initial goal and that's really great, really exciting for me.
So thank you for all of your support!
So onto today's topic:
Imagine that there was a mysterious language in Europe that was surrounded on all sides by languages that it had absolutely no connection with.
Well there actually is a language like that. The language is the Basque language.
Basque is a language isolate, meaning that it has no known connection to any other language.
It's located in Europe, but it is not an Indo-European language.
It forms its own language family and it is quite distinct, very different, from Indo-European languages
It is spoken by the Basque people in the Basque country, a region that spans the Spain-France border in the western-most Pyrenees mountains.
It is not spoken by all Basques, but by around 27% of them in the Basque country overall.
The number of native speakers is 714,135 out of a total population of 2,648,998,
and that includes about 663,000 on the Spanish side, and 51,100 on the French side.
It is an official language at the regional level in Spain, in the Basque Autonomous Community, and in Navarre.
In France, it holds no official status.
The origins of the Basque language are shrouded in mystery. As I said before, it is a language isolate.
It is thought to be the last remaining language that existed in Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages.
There are some other pre-Indo-European languages in the Caucasus Region, but Basque is the only one in Western Europe.
There is conclusive evidence that Basque is a descendant of the Aquitanian language, which is an ancient language spoken in the Pyrenees region.
Some similarities are known between Aquitanian and the ancient Iberian language, so some people think that they might be related.
But those similarities might just be due to geographic proximity and mutual influence. We don't know.
Some linguists suggest that Aquitanian was part of a wider language family called the Vasconic languages,
which covered most of Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages.
But, again, we don't know.
Other people draw a connection between Basque and other non-Indo-European languages like the Caucasian languages.
But again...
(Let me guess, we don't know?)
that's right, we don't know.
One thing we do know is that the Basque people, who descend mostly from farmers who arrived in the area around 6,000 years ago,
were isolated from the outside world for thousands of years.
That's probably partly because of the Basque country's forested mountain terrain,
and its lack of tempting resources that prevented invasion.
This isolation is probably what allowed their language to survive and develop into the Basque language of today.
Of course, there were Latin borrowings into the language,
and there have been other Romance language borrowings throughout the centuries,
but nothing like the total disappearance of other pre-Latin languages in that area.
Basque was a unified language until the Middle Ages, when it began to diverge into dialects,
because of administrative and political divisions within the Basque country.
Despite being ruled by outside regimes throughout the centuries,
the Basque country still remained isolated and relatively uninfluenced by the outside world, and that includes the language.
But when Francisco Franco became ruler of Spain in 1939, the use of Basque was heavily suppressed,
because Franco wanted to assimilate all of Spain into castilian culture.
It was forbidden to speak Basque in schools and in public. It was banned from media and removed from public services.
This led to a big reduction in the number of people who could speak the Basque language,
and that's part of the reason that only 27% of people in the Basque country speak the language today.
In the 1960s, that suppression was eased somewhat, and Basque language schools became permitted,
and the language began being used in publications and in education again.
This led to the creation of a standardised language called Euskara Batua.
It was developed by the Basque Language Academy, or the "Euskaltzaindia",
and it was intended to be comprehensible to the speakers of the various dialects of Basque.
There are 5 main Basque dialects: Bizkaian or Western Basque, Gipuzkoan or Central Basque,
Upper Navarese, Navarro-Lapurdian, and Souletin in France.
These dialects correspond with the historic provinces of the Basque country,
but they don't completely correspond with the modern provinces of today.
The level of intelligibility depends on the distance between those two dialects on the dialect continuum,
with the most distant dialects having trouble understanding each other.
But that's where the standard language, Euskara Batua, comes in. So, what is the Basque language like?
Well, its vocabulary has been influenced by the surrounding Romance languages to some extent.
But when you look at its structure, you'll see that it is unlike any Romance language,
or like any Indo-European language for that matter.
Basque has grammatical cases, 12 cases to be exact, but that is not really unusual in Indo-European languages,
but it has something called the "ergotive case".
That means that there's a special form of the noun when it's the subject of a sentence and takes a transitive verb.
That means it has a direct object. This ergotive case is marked by a "k" at the end of the noun.
Now, along with the ergotive case, there's also something called the "absolutive case".
This is for subjects of intransitive verbs, meaning that it has no direct object,
and in this case there is no ending on the end of the noun.
Well, let's take a look at a couple of sentences.
[Basque-speaking voice: umea kalean erori da]
That means, "The child fell in the street", but if we look at it word by word, you can see the interesting structure of Basque,
Word-by-word it's "child-the", "street-the-in", "fall", "is".
If we look at the first word there: "ume" is child, but then the definite article is the "a" at the end.
Then for the next word, "kalean", "kale" is street, and then the definite article is "a", and then "in" is the "n" at the end of the word.
If we look at the next word, "erori", that's a verb meaning "fall", but it's in the Perfect Aspect, that means it shows the completed action.
And then the auxiliary verb comes after the main verb, and this one means "is". It's the present-tense form of "to be".
And another sentence,
[Basque-speaking voice: gizonak umeari liburua eman dio]
That means "The man has given the book to the child".
So, word-by-word, "man-the", in the ergotive case.
"child-the", dative case,
"book-the", "given", "has"
The first word is "gizonak", "gizon" is "man", then the definite article is "a", and the the ergotive case is "k".
"umeari", that's "child". Again, "child" is "ume", and then this time it has the definite article, "a", and then it has the dative case marker, "ri", at the end
The dative case basically shows who or what is being affected by the action.
The next word, "liburua", "liburu" is "book", and "a" is the definitive article, and this one looks like a loan word from a romance language,
and the next word, "eman" is a verb, and it's in the Perfect Aspect, showing that the action has been completed.
And then the auxiliary verb, dio, comes after, and that means "has".
And the next sentence,
[Basque-speaking voice: emakumeak gizona ikusi du]
That means, "The woman has seen the man".
So, word-by-word, "woman-the" ergotive case, "Man-the", "seen", "has".
So the first word, "emakumeak", "emakume" is "woman", "the" is the "a", and the ergotive case is the "k".
The next word, "gizona", that's "the man", and the definite article again,
the next word is "ikusi", which means "seen", and again, that's a verb with the Perfect aspect showing the action's completed.
And then the auxiliary verb comes at the end, and it means "has".
As you can see, the Basque language is very different from any Indo-European language,
very different from any language that I've [ever] studied, but it also looks quite logical and systematic.
It would be a shame to lose a language that's so unique and that connects us with the ancient history of Europe.
The number of Basque speakers has sharply declined over the last century,
but there are efforts in Spain to revive the language, and to make it more widespread again,
and hopefully such efforts will continue and become more prominent in France as well.
Thank you for watching the LangFocus channel.
I want to say thanks again to all of my Patreon supporters, you guys are awesome, I appreciate you,
Thanks to all those other people who volunteered in different ways by creating subtitles for videos,
or offering to write some scripts for GeoFocus, or all of those things.
Also be sure to check out the LangFocus Facebook account, Twitter account, and Instagram,
because I'm often on there, and that's a way to keep in touch, and always know when I have new content being released.
Thank you for watching and have a nice day.
[Subtitled de amor by @dangeredwolf]