Basque

About Basque

Basque, called euskara by its speakers, is spoken by about 750,000 people in the Basque Country, which straddles the western Pyrenees in northern Spain and southwestern France. It is not related to any other known language and was spoken in the region before the Indo-European languages arrived. In Spain it is an official language alongside Spanish in the Basque Autonomous Community and in northern Navarre.

Basque is written much as it is pronounced. x sounds like sh, tx like ch and z like a sharp s, while s is a softer sound between s and sh. The everyday polite "you" is zu, which is safe with anyone. A familiar form, hi, exists but is kept for close friends.

Familynone known (language isolate)
Speakersabout 750,000 (2016)
Official inSpain, regionally (Basque Autonomous Community, Navarre)
Statusvulnerable (UNESCO)
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codeseu (ISO 639-1), eus (ISO 639-3)

Speaker number: sixth sociolinguistic survey of the Basque Country (2016), via Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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