Interview with Julen Manterola "Is Basque an Agglutinative Language?"

 Julen Manterola Agirre is from the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz, the headquarters of the Basque Autonomous Government and capitol city of the province of Alava.  He was in California last week to give a presentation at a Basque Studies Symposium at the University of California Santa Barbara titled,  “Is Basque an Agglutinative Language?”.  The conference was organized the the Spanish Portuguese Department with hopes of generating enough interest to add Basque language, history and cultural studies to its program.

The conference was not only a success with over 100 people attending the opening session, but it was well-received as the attendees participated fully in the question and answer period.  Please see our articles on the success and  interviews with the organizers and others.

Original article on Basque Studies Sympoisum UC Santa Barbara

Interview with symposium organizer, Viola Miglio

Symposium - A Success and Interview with Xabier Irujo

EuskoSare interview with Julen Manterola:

Being agglutinative is a linguistic feature of some languages regarding their morphology.  That has nothing to do with sociolinguistics, whether a language is able to "gather" more or less speakers.  It only means in purely, strict grammatical terms, that each morpheme (smallest meaningful grammatical unit of a language) bears a single meaning. The contrary happens in languages such as Latin, where a single morpheme bears more than one meaning.

Example:  Latin: arbor-ibus 'from the mountains', the morpheme -ibus is both plural and ablative (denoting direction from a place).

In Basque, we would two different morphemes, one for plural, another for ablative (telling the direction from where).  You see, agglutinative is just a technical term for this behavior of the languages.. Sorry if I bore you with these technical issues.

One can see this aspect of Basque in the nominal declension (variation of a noun form).  When one says "mendian" 'in the mountain', one can see that Basque has everything attached to the right side of the noun "mendi" 'mountain'; mendi-a-n.  Basque morphemes are thus, attached, but still, unlike the Latin example above, one can perfectly distinguish each morpheme: -a- would be the article 'the' and -n 'in'.  This is, I think, a straightforward example of the difference between Basque and Latin nominal declensions.

3.  What characteristics does the Basque language possess that differentiates it from others?
Basque is one more language in the world and it shares many features with other languages, as well as it bears some specific characteristics of its own.  What makes Basque different is its comparison to other languages in the surrounding area, namely western Europe.  Basque is an island, of unknown affiliation, among the Indo-European languages.  It has many features that make it distinct from neighboring languages such as the Germanic and romance languages. 

For example, Basque is ergative (a unit of work or energy) and has a Subject-Object-Verb word order.   It is also usually described as agglutinative (sticking together, fusing).   These features, among others, make Basque different from western European languages.   Although I would like to emphasize that these features can be found in many other languages of the world.  Basque is, thus, a "special" language in its European context, but as “weird” as any other language in the world.