The Basque/Euskara

For a class on Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation at Utah State University, I was assigned to a group to work on the ETA or "Euskadi Ta Askatasuna ("Basque Homeland and Liberty" or "Basque Country and Freedom"), an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization in the Basque Country." (Wikipedia, 2021)

It was neat as a part-time linguist and human geographer to learn more about the Euskara. They kept their independence for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Their language is one of the few non-Indo-European languages still alive in Europe. Many came over to the United States, especially in the Great Basin region of Utah, Nevada, and Boise, Idaho as shepherds. Their genetic and geographic contributions to society must not be forgotten. The only correction I would add after looking at the slides again was that there are more languages that survived the Indo-European onslaught, and in fact took root over Indo-European cultures. Examples of said cultures include Hungarian/Magyar, Finnish, and the Sami.

Recently, another article attracted my interest. As someone who likes reading about current advances in the field of population genetics, it was interesting to see how a linguistic isolate such as Euskara could make their ethnic enclave in the northern part of Spain impervious to Roman and Islamic incursions both in language, identity, and in genetics. In the course of human history and prehistory, this kind of isolation is remarkably rare.