Basques
The Basques are a Southwestern European ethnic group, characterised by the Basque language, a common culture, shared genetic ancestry to the ancient Vascones and Aquitanians, and are considered among the last remaining direct descendants of Neolithic Europeans populations in Europe. Basques are indigenous to, and primarily inhabit, an area traditionally known as the Basque Country —a region that is located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France.
Etymology
The English word Basque may be pronounced or and derives from the French Basque, itself derived from Gascon Basco, cognate with Spanish Vasco . Those, in turn, come from Latin Vascō. The Latin generally evolved into the bilabials and in Gascon and Spanish, probably under the influence of Basque and the related Aquitanian.Several coins from the 2nd and the 1st centuries BC found in the Basque Country bear the inscription barscunes. The place in which they were minted is not certain but is thought to be somewhere near Pamplona, in the heartland of the area that historians believe was inhabited by the Vascones. Some scholars have suggested a Celtic etymology based on bhar-s-, meaning "summit", "point" or "leaves", according to which barscunes may have meant "the mountain people", "the tall ones" or "the proud ones", and others have posited a relationship to a Proto-Indo-European root *bar- meaning "border", "frontier", "march".
In Basque, people call themselves the euskaldunak, singular euskaldun, formed from euskal- and -dun ; euskaldun literally means a Basque-speaker. Not all Basques are Basque-speakers. Therefore, the neologism euskotar, plural euskotarrak, was coined in the 19th century to mean a Basque person, whether Basque-speaking or not. Alfonso Irigoyen posits that the word euskara is derived from an ancient Basque verb enautsi "to say" and the suffix -ara. Thus, euskara would mean literally "way of saying" or "way of speaking". One item of evidence in favour of that hypothesis is found in the Spanish book Compendio Historial, written in 1571 by the Basque writer Esteban de Garibay. He records the name of the Basque language as enusquera. That may, however, be a writing mistake.
In the 19th century, the Basque nationalist activist Sabino Arana posited an original root euzko, which he thought came from eguzkiko. On the basis of that putative root, Arana proposed the name Euzkadi for an independent Basque nation, composed of seven Basque historical territories. Arana's neologism Euzkadi is still widely used in both Basque and Spanish since it is now the official name of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country.
Genetic origins
The distinctiveness noted by studies of classical genetic markers and the pre-Indo-European of the Basque language has resulted in a popular and long-held view that Basques are "living fossils" of the earliest modern humans who colonised Europe. Partly for these reasons, anthropological and genetic studies from the beginning and the end of the 20th century theorized that the Basques are the descendants of the original Cro-Magnons.But although they are genetically distinctive in some ways due to isolation, the Basques are still very typically European in their Y-DNA and mtDNA sequences, and in some other genetic loci. These same sequences are widespread throughout the Western half of Europe, especially along the Western fringe of the continent.
History
Basque tribes were mentioned in Roman times by Strabo and Pliny, including the Vascones, Aquitani, and others. There is enough evidence to support the hypothesis that at that time and later they spoke old varieties of the Basque language.In the Early Middle Ages, the territory between the Ebro and Garonne rivers was known as Vasconia, a vaguely defined ethnic area and political entity struggling to fend off pressure from the Iberian Visigothic kingdom and Arab rule to the south, as well as the Frankish push from the north. By the turn of the first millennium, the territory of Vasconia had fragmented into different feudal regions, such as Soule and Labourd, while south of the Pyrenees the Castile, Pamplona and the Pyrenean counties of Aragon, Sobrarbe, Ribagorça, and Pallars emerged as the main regional entities with Basque population in the 9th and 10th centuries.
The Kingdom of Pamplona, a central Basque realm, later known as Navarre, underwent a process of feudalization and was subject to the influence of its much larger Aragonese, Castilian and French neighbours. Castile deprived Navarre of its coastline by conquering key western territories, leaving the kingdom landlocked. The Basques were ravaged by the War of the Bands, bitter partisan wars between local ruling families. Weakened by the Navarrese civil war, the bulk of the realm eventually fell before the onslaught of the Spanish armies. However, the Navarrese territory north of the Pyrenees remained beyond the reach of an increasingly powerful Spain. Lower Navarre became a province of France in 1620.
Nevertheless, the Basques enjoyed a great deal of self-government until the French Revolution and the Carlist Wars, when the Basques supported heir apparent Carlos V and his descendants. On either side of the Pyrenees, the Basques lost their native institutions and laws held during the Ancien régime. Since then, despite the current limited self-governing status of the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre as settled by the Spanish Constitution, many Basques have attempted higher degrees of self-empowerment, sometimes by acts of violence. Labourd, Lower Navarre, and Soule were integrated into the French department system, with Basque efforts to establish a region-specific political-administrative entity failing to take off to date. However, in January 2017, a single agglomeration community was established for the Basque Country in France.
Geography
Political and administrative divisions
The Basque region is divided into at least three administrative units, namely the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre in Spain, and the arrondissement of Bayonne and the cantons of Mauléon-Licharre and Tardets-Sorholus in the département of Pyrénées Atlantiques, France.The autonomous community known as Euskal Autonomia Erkidegoa or EAE in Basque and as Comunidad Autónoma Vasca or CAV in Spanish, is made up of the three Spanish provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa. The corresponding Basque names of these territories are Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, and their Spanish names are Álava, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa.
The BAC only includes three of the seven provinces of the currently called historical territories. It is sometimes referred to simply as "the Basque Country" by writers and public agencies only considering those three western provinces, but also on occasions merely as a convenient abbreviation when this does not lead to confusion in the context. Others reject this usage as inaccurate and are careful to specify the BAC when referring to this entity or region. Likewise, terms such as "the Basque Government" for "the government of the BAC" are commonly though not universally employed. In particular in common usage the French term Pays Basque, in the absence of further qualification, refers either to the whole Basque Country, or not infrequently to the northern Basque Country specifically.
Under Spain's present constitution, Navarre constitutes a separate entity, called in present-day Basque Nafarroako Foru Erkidegoa, in Spanish Comunidad Foral de Navarra. The government of this autonomous community is the Government of Navarre. In historical contexts Navarre may refer to a wider area, and that the present-day northern Basque province of Lower Navarre may also be referred to as Nafarroa, while the term "High Navarre" is also encountered as a way of referring to the territory of the present-day autonomous community.
There are three other historic provinces parts of the Basque Country: Labourd, Lower Navarre and Soule, devoid of official status within France's present-day political and administrative territorial organization, and only minor political support to the Basque nationalists. A large number of regional and local nationalist and non-nationalist representatives have waged a campaign for years advocating for the creation of a separate Basque département, while these demands have gone unheard by the French administration.
Population, main cities, and languages
There are 2,123,000 people living in the Basque Autonomous Community. The most important cities in this region, which serve as the provinces' administrative centers, are Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Vitoria-Gasteiz. The official languages are Basque and Spanish. Knowledge of Spanish is compulsory under the Spanish constitution, and knowledge and usage of Basque is a right under the Statute of Autonomy, so only knowledge of Spanish is virtually universal. Knowledge of Basque, after declining for many years during Franco's dictatorship owing to official persecution, is again on the rise due to favorable official language policies and popular support. Currently about 33 percent of the population in the Basque Autonomous Community speaks Basque.Navarre has a population of 601,000; its administrative capital and main city, also regarded by many nationalist Basques as the Basques' historical capital, is Pamplona. Only Spanish is an official language of Navarre, and the Basque language is only co-official in the province's northern region, where the highest concentration of Basque speakers is found. In absolute figures, however, the majority of Basque speakers in the province are located outside this co-official area.
About a quarter of a million people live in the French Basque Country. Nowadays Basque-speakers refer to this region as Iparralde, and to the Spanish provinces as Hegoalde. Much of this population lives in or near the Bayonne-Anglet-Biarritz urban belt on the coast. The Basque language, which was traditionally spoken by most of the region's population outside the BAB urban zone, is today rapidly losing ground to French. The French Basque Country's lack of self-government within the French state is coupled with the absence of official status for the Basque language in the region. Attempts to introduce bilingualism in local administration have so far met direct refusal from French officials.