Basque Culture

The Basques ( or ; ; ; ) are a Southwestern European ethnic group, characterised by the Basque language, a common culture and shared genetic ancestry to the ancient Vascones and Aquitanians. Basques are indigenous to, and primarily inhabit, an area traditionally known as the Basque Country ()—a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France.

Etymology

The English word ''Basque'' may be pronounced or and derives from the French ''Basque'' (), itself derived from Gascon ''Basco'' (pronounced ), cognate with Spanish ''Vasco ''(pronounced ). Those, in turn, come from Latin ''Vascō'' (pronounced ; plural '' Vascōnēs''—see history section below). The Latin generally evolved into the bilabials and in Gascon and Spanish, probably under the influence of Basque and the related Aquitanian (the Latin /w/ instead evolved into in French, Italian and other Romance languages).

Several coins from the 2nd and the 1st centuries BC found in the Basque Country bear the inscription ''barscunes''. The place in which they were minted is not certain but is thought to be somewhere near Pamplona, in the heartland of the area that historians believe was inhabited by the ''Vascones''. Some scholars have suggested a Celtic etymology based on ''bhar-s-'', meaning "summit", "point" or "leaves", according to which ''barscunes'' may have meant "the mountain people", "the tall ones" or "the proud ones", and others have posited a relationship to a Proto-Indo-European root ''*bar-'' meaning "border", "frontier", "march".

In Basque, people call themselves the ''euskaldunak'', singular ''euskaldun'', formed from ''euskal-'' (i.e. "Basque (language)") and ''-dun'' (i.e. "one who has"); ''euskaldun'' literally means a Basque-speaker. Not all Basques are Basque-speakers. Therefore, the neologism ''euskotar'', plural ''euskotarrak'', was coined in the 19th century to mean a Basque person, whether Basque-speaking or not. Alfonso Irigoyen posits that the word ''euskara'' is derived from an ancient Basque verb ''enautsi'' "to say" (compare modern Basque ''esan'') and the suffix ''-(k)ara'' ("way (of doing something)"). Thus, ''euskara'' would mean literally "way of saying" or "way of speaking". One item of evidence in favour of that hypothesis is found in the Spanish book ''Compendio Historial'', written in 1571 by the Basque writer Esteban de Garibay. He records the name of the Basque language as ''enusquera''. That may, however, be a writing mistake.

In the 19th century, the Basque nationalist activist Sabino Arana posited an original root ''euzko'', which he thought came from ''eguzkiko'' ("of the sun", related to the assumption of an original solar religion). On the basis of that putative root, Arana proposed the name Euzkadi for an independent Basque nation, composed of seven Basque historical territories. Arana's neologism ''Euzkadi'' (in the regularized spelling ''Euskadi'') is still widely used in both Basque and Spanish since it is now the official name of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country.

Genetic origins

The distinctiveness noted by studies of classical genetic markers (such as blood groups) and the pre-Indo-European of the Basque language has resulted in a popular and long-held view that Basques are "living fossils" of the earliest modern humans who colonised Europe. Partly for these reasons, anthropological and genetic studies from the beginning and the end of the 20th century theorized that the Basques are the descendants of the original Cro-Magnons.

But although they are genetically distinctive in some ways due to isolation, the Basques are still very typically European in their Y-DNA and mtDNA sequences, and in some other genetic loci. These same sequences are widespread throughout the Western half of Europe, especially along the Western fringe of the continent.

History

Basque tribes were mentioned in Roman times by Strabo and Pliny, including the Vascones, Aquitani, and others. There is enough evidence to support the hypothesis that at that time and later they spoke old varieties of the Basque language (see: Aquitanian language).

In the Early Middle Ages, the territory between the Ebro and Garonne rivers was known as Vasconia, a vaguely defined ethnic area and political entity struggling to fend off pressure from the Iberian Visigothic kingdom and Arab rule to the south, as well as the Frankish push from the north. By the turn of the first millennium, the territory of Vasconia had fragmented into different feudal regions, such as Soule and Labourd, while south of the Pyrenees the Castile, Pamplona and the Pyrenean counties of Aragon, Sobrarbe, Ribagorça (later Kingdom of Aragon), and Pallars emerged as the main regional entities with Basque population in the 9th and 10th centuries.

The Kingdom of Pamplona, a central Basque realm, later known as Navarre, underwent a process of feudalization and was subject to the influence of its much larger Aragonese, Castilian and French neighbours. Castile deprived Navarre of its coastline by conquering key western territories (1199–1201), leaving the kingdom landlocked. The Basques were ravaged by the War of the Bands, bitter partisan wars between local ruling families. Weakened by the Navarrese civil war, the bulk of the realm eventually fell before the onslaught of the Spanish armies (1512–1524). However, the Navarrese territory north of the Pyrenees remained beyond the reach of an increasingly powerful Spain. Lower Navarre became a province of France in 1620.

Nevertheless, the Basques enjoyed a great deal of self-government until the French Revolution (1790) and the Carlist Wars (1839, 1876), when the Basques supported heir apparent Carlos V and his descendants. On either side of the Pyrenees, the Basques lost their native institutions and laws held during the ''Ancien régime''. Since then, despite the current limited self-governing status of the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre as settled by the Spanish Constitution, many Basques have attempted higher degrees of self-empowerment (see Basque nationalism), sometimes by acts of violence. Labourd, Lower Navarre, and Soule were integrated into the French department system (starting 1790), with Basque efforts to establish a region-specific political-administrative entity failing to take off to date. However, in January 2017, a single agglomeration community was established for the Basque Country in France.

Geography

Political and administrative divisions

The Basque region is divided into at least three administrative units, namely the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre in Spain, and the arrondissement of Bayonne and the cantons of Mauléon-Licharre and Tardets-Sorholus in the ''département'' of Pyrénées Atlantiques, France.

The autonomous community (a concept established in the Spanish Constitution of 1978) known as ''Euskal Autonomia Erkidegoa'' or EAE in Basque and as ''Comunidad Autónoma Vasca'' or CAV in Spanish (in English: ''Basque Autonomous Community'' or BAC), is made up of the three Spanish provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa. The corresponding Basque names of these territories are ''Araba'', ''Bizkaia'' and ''Gipuzkoa'', and their Spanish names are ''Álava'', ''Vizcaya'' and ''Guipúzcoa''.

The BAC only includes three of the seven provinces of the currently called historical territories. It is sometimes referred to simply as "the Basque Country" (or ''Euskadi'') by writers and public agencies only considering those three western provinces, but also on occasions merely as a convenient abbreviation when this does not lead to confusion in the context. Others reject this usage as inaccurate and are careful to specify the BAC (or an equivalent expression such as "the three provinces", up to 1978 referred to as "Provincias Vascongadas" in Spanish) when referring to this entity or region. Likewise, terms such as "the Basque Government" for "the government of the BAC" are commonly though not universally employed. In particular in common usage the French term ''Pays Basque'' ("Basque Country"), in the absence of further qualification, refers either to the whole Basque Country ("Euskal Herria" in Basque), or not infrequently to the northern (or "French") Basque Country specifically.

Under Spain's present constitution, Navarre (''Nafarroa'' in present-day Basque, ''Navarra'' historically in Spanish) constitutes a separate entity, called in present-day Basque ''Nafarroako Foru Erkidegoa'', in Spanish ''Comunidad Foral de Navarra'' (the autonomous community of Navarre). The government of this autonomous community is the Government of Navarre. In historical contexts Navarre may refer to a wider area, and that the present-day northern Basque province of Lower Navarre may also be referred to as (part of) ''Nafarroa'', while the term "High Navarre" (''Nafarroa Garaia'' in Basque, ''Alta Navarra'' in Spanish) is also encountered as a way of referring to the territory of the present-day autonomous community.

There are three other historic provinces parts of the Basque Country: Labourd, Lower Navarre and Soule (''Lapurdi, Nafarroa Beherea'' and ''Zuberoa'' in Basque; ''Labourd, Basse-Navarre'' and ''Soule'' in French), devoid of official status within France's present-day political and administrative territorial organization, and only minor political support to the Basque nationalists. A large number of regional and local nationalist and non-nationalist representatives have waged a campaign for years advocating for the creation of a separate Basque département, while these demands have gone unheard by the French administration.

Population, main cities, and languages

There are 2,123,000 people living in the Basque Autonomous Community (279,000 in Alava, 1,160,000 in Biscay and 684,000 in Gipuzkoa). The most important cities in this region, which serve as the provinces' administrative centers, are Bilbao (in Biscay), San Sebastián (in Gipuzkoa), and Vitoria-Gasteiz (in Álava). The official languages are Basque and Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish is compulsory under the Spanish constitution (article no. 3), and knowledge and usage of Basque is a right under the Statute of Autonomy (article no. 6), so only knowledge of Spanish is virtually universal. Knowledge of Basque, after declining for many years during Franco's dictatorship owing to official persecution, is again on the rise due to favorable official language policies and popular support. Currently about 33 percent of the population in the Basque Autonomous Community speaks Basque.

Navarre has a population of 601,000; its administrative capital and main city, also regarded by many nationalist Basques as the Basques' historical capital, is Pamplona (''Iruñea'' in modern Basque). Only Spanish is an official language of Navarre, and the Basque language is only co-official in the province's northern region, where most Basque-speaking Navarrese are concentrated.

About a quarter of a million people live in the French Basque Country. Nowadays Basque-speakers refer to this region as ''Iparralde'' (Basque for North), and to the Spanish provinces as ''Hegoalde'' (South). Much of this population lives in or near the Bayonne-Anglet-Biarritz (BAB) urban belt on the coast (in Basque these are ''Baiona'', ''Angelu'' and ''Miarritze''). 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. Attempts to introduce bilingualism in local administration have so far met direct refusal from French officials.

Basque diaspora

Large numbers of Basques have left the Basque Country to settle in the rest of Spain, France or other parts of the world in different historical periods, often for economic or political reasons. Historically the Basques abroad were often employed in shepherding and ranching and by maritime fisheries and merchants. Millions of Basque descendants (see Basque American and Basque Canadian) live in North America (the United States; Canada, mainly in the provinces of Newfoundland and Quebec), all over Latin America, South Africa, and Australia.

Latin America

Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno said: "There are at least two things that clearly can be attributed to Basques: the Society of Jesus and the Republic of Chile." Chilean historian Luis Thayer Ojeda estimated that 48 percent of immigrants to Chile in the 17th and 18th centuries were Basque. Estimates for the number of Basque descendants living in Chile range between 2.5 and 5 million; the Basque have been a major, if not the strongest, influence in the country's cultural and economic development.

In Bolivia, the War of the Vicuñas and Basques (Spanish: Guerra de Vicuñas y Vascongados), was an armed conflict in Charcas Province

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