Standard Basque

Standard Basque (Basque: euskara batua, lit. 'united Basque') is a standardised version of the Basque language, developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s, which nowadays is the most widely and commonly spoken Basque-language version throughout the Basque Country. Heavily based on the literary tradition of the central areas (Gipuzkoan and Lapurdian dialects), it is the version of the language that is commonly used in education at all levels, from elementary school to university, on television and radio, and in the vast majority of all written production in Basque.

It is also used in common parlance by new speakers that have not learnt any local dialect, especially in the cities, whereas in the countryside, with more elderly speakers, people remain attached to the natural dialects to a higher degree, especially in informal situations; i.e. Basque traditional dialects are still used in the situations where they always were used (native Basque speakers speaking in informal situations), while batua has conquered new fields for the Basque language: the formal situations (where Basque was seldom used, apart from religion) and a lot of new speakers that otherwise would not have learned Basque.

Euskara batua enjoys official language status in Spain (in the whole Basque Autonomous Community and in the northern sections of Navarre) but remains unrecognised as an official language in France, the only language officially recognised by that country being French.

History

The standard version of Basque was created in the 1970s by the Euskaltzaindia (Royal Academy of the Basque Language), mainly based on the central Basque dialect and on the written tradition. Having been for centuries pressured by acculturation from both Spanish and French, and particularly under the rule of Franco in which the Basque language was prohibited and came closer to extinction in Spain, the Academy felt the need to create a unified dialect of Basque, so that the language had a greater chance of survival.

The 1968 Arantzazu Congress took place in the sanctuary of Arantzazu, a shrine perched in the highlands of Gipuzkoa and a dynamic Basque cultural focus, where the basic guidelines were laid down for achieving that objective in a systematic way (lexicon, morphology, declension and spelling). A further step was taken in 1973 with a proposal to establish a standard conjugation.

The debate arising from this new set of standard language rules (1968–1976) did not prevent Standard Basque from becoming increasingly accepted as the Basque standard language in teaching, the media, and administration (1976–1983), within the context of burgeoning regional government (Statute of Autonomy of the Basque Country, 1979; Improvement of the Charter of Navarre, 1982).