Basque Language - History and Classification

History and Classification

Though geographically surrounded by Indo-European Romance languages, Basque is classified as a language isolate. It is the last remaining descendant of the pre-Indo-European languages of Western Europe. Consequently, its prehistory may not be reconstructible by means of the comparative method except by applying it to differences between dialects within the language. Little is known of its origins but it is likely that an early form of the Basque language was present in Western Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages to the area.

The Basque prehistorian José Miguel Barandiaran showed the prehistoric origins of some Basque vocabulary terms, like aizkora meaning "axe", in which aiz means "stone" and kora "on top" (Dictionnaire étymologique basque-français-espagnol). However, this is disputed by scholars such as Larry Trask, who hypothesize a Latin origin (from the latin word asciola, little ax).

Latin inscriptions in Aquitania preserve a number of words with cognates in reconstructed proto-Basque, for instance the personal names Nescato and Cison (neskato and gizon mean "young girl" and "man" respectively in modern Basque). This language is generally referred to as Aquitanian and is assumed to have been spoken in the area before the Roman conquests in the western Pyrenees. Some authors even argue that the language moved westward during Late Antiquity, after the fall of Rome, into the north part of Hispania in which Basque is spoken today.

Roman neglect of this area allowed Aquitanian to survive while the Iberian and Tartessian languages became extinct. Through the long contact with Romance languages, Basque adopted a sizable number of Romance words. Initially the source was Latin, later Gascon (a branch of Occitan) in the northeast, Navarro-Aragonese in the southeast and Spanish in the southwest.