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The Basque alphabet is a
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
used to write the Basque language. It consists of 27 letters.


List of letters

The letters of the Basque alphabet are the 26 letters of the
ISO basic Latin alphabet The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets ( uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...
plus (and , as a variant of ). This is the whole list,
Euskaltzaindia Euskaltzaindia (; often translated Royal Academy of the Basque Language) is the official academic language regulatory institution which watches over the Basque language. It conducts research, seeks to protect the language, and establishes stand ...

Rule no. 17 for the Standard Basque, ''Names of the letters in the Basque alphabet''
Rule passed on 25 November 1994. Retrieved 2010-10-22.
plus their corresponding phonemes in
IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners A ...
: All letters and digraphs represent unique
phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
s. The main exception is if are preceded by ; most dialects palatalize the sound into , and even if that is not written. is silent in most regions but is pronounced in much of the Northeast, which is the main reason for its existence in the Basque alphabet. It doesn't even represent syllable breaks in the other dialects, although it can stop the aforementioned palatalization from taking place in some words, for example the in .


Digraphs

There are several digraphs (successive letters used to represent a single sound): : , , , , , ,


History

For most of its history, Basque writers used the conventions of
Romance language The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
s like
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
or
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
. Thus
Pedro Agerre Pedro Agerre, best known as ''Axular'', was one of the main Basque writers of the 17th century. His main work was '' Gero'' (''Later''), published in 1643, an ascetic book written with elaborate prose and composed following the traumatic period of ...
's 1643 book was titled '' Guero'' corresponding to modern ("Later") and the 18th-century motto would be ("The three as one"). In the late 19th century the nationalist politician
Sabino Arana Sabino Policarpo Arana Goiri (in Spanish), Sabin Polikarpo Arana Goiri (in Basque), or Arana ta Goiri'taŕ Sabin (self-styled) (26 January 1865 – 25 November 1903), was a Basque writer and the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) ...
proposed several changes, including new letters such as and that were not accepted in the standard orthography. The present-day Standard Basque was developed in the second half of the 20th century, and has been set by rules of
Euskaltzaindia Euskaltzaindia (; often translated Royal Academy of the Basque Language) is the official academic language regulatory institution which watches over the Basque language. It conducts research, seeks to protect the language, and establishes stand ...
(the Basque Language Academy). Regarding the alphabet, the main criticism by Biscayan and Gipuzkoan traditionalists targeted the , as the orthography ruled by Euskaltzaindia used it in several words that those traditionalists wrote without this letter, which is silent both in Biscay and Gipuzkoa — whereas it was pronounced in all Basque dialects some centuries ago and still is pronounced in much of the Northeast. On the other hand, Basque speakers of the Northeast had to learn to write several words with less or no letters, because usually a used in their tradition were not taken into the Standard Basque orthography. These changes from the various traditions into the modern Standard Basque were proposed and accepted by the young generations of Basque writers, so the controversy faded as the old generations died.


Letter frequencies

In a sample of 6,692 letters, the most common letter in Basque is and the least common is (although did not appear at all in the sampled text).


References


External links


Basque language – English Pen
{{Language orthographies
Alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
Latin alphabets