What makes the Basque language so unique?
Most of Europe speaks Indo-European languages. Indo-European is a huge language family which includes most of the languages spoken in Europe, as well as Sanskrit and related languages in India. Basque’s uniqueness stems from the fact that it is not an Indo-European language. In fact, it is believed to be far older, one of the remnants of the language family spoken in Europe before Indo-European people began migrating across the continent. Basque is considered to be a language isolate, and scholars have been unable to connect it to any other known language. Basque has a very different vocabulary and a completely different sentence structure from nearby languages. Nobody knows exactly when the ancestors of the modern-day Basque people arrived in the Pyrenees, but evidence of continuity in local archaeological sites has led some scholars to believe that they have been there for about 35,000 years, since before the dawn of agriculture. The first historical mention we have of the tribes inh
