The bulk of research suggests that Basque is not related to any other language that we know. It is a so-called isolated or independent language, contrary to all the other languages that are spoken in Europe today, which are part of a larger language family.
The Basque language is spoken by approximately 700,000 people in the Basque Country in the Spanish-French border region on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean; more than 580,000 of them are living in Spain.
In the Spanish Basque Country the language has the status of a regional official language since 1978. In Navarra is has a co-official language in mainly Basque-speaking municipalities since 1986.
Basque was able to hold its ground in the western part of the Pyrenees in Spain and France against several Indo-European languages, including Celtic, Latin and the current Romance languages. However, it absorbed many words from all these languages.
Basque is an agglutinative language (i.e. units with grammatic meaning are joined as affixes to a specific word) and is typologically completely different from all the neighbouring Romance languages and also from all the other Indo-European languages. Furthermore Basque has no gender grammar, but very rich morphology and a complex verb system.
Basques in France (80.000 Speaker)
Basques in Spain (587.000 Speaker)