UC Santa Barbara Basque Conference - A Success

On Wednesday, May 14th, the first of a series of Basque Studies conferences was held at University of California at Santa Barbara.  According to organizer, Viola Miglio, the conference was well attended with over 100 people at the opening session and between 50 and 70 people attended the specialized sessions on linguistics and literature.

Ms. Miglio thanked EuskoSare for our coverage of the symposium and stated that the event was a great success. She said that the papers presented were of excellent quality. Ms. Miglio and other organizers of the conference sincerely hope that the successful outcome will contribute to keeping interest in Basque Studies alive at UC Santa Barbara and that they may soon open the search for the endowed Barandiaran Chair, and offer again courses in Basque language, culture, literature and history on a regular basis.

EuskoSare asked Dr. Xabier Irujo, assistant Professor at University of Nevada, Reno, to summarize his presentation on Basque Language Rights.

"I spoke about the language rights in both the Spanish and the French regions. Today the Basque language is spoken by less than one million people but has six different administrative authorities.  Within the Spanish region, it is co-official only in the Basque Autonomous Community, meaning that it is mandatory for every   Basque to learn Spanish but only a right to learn Basque. In Navarre, the Basque language has three different administrative authorities. Consequently, in the south of the Navarre territory it is tacitly forbidden to study in Basque: there are no public Ikastolas (schools taught in Basque).  In the French region, Basque simply does not exist from an administrative point of view.  France does not recognize the Basque language as an official language in the region.

As a result of this, the Basque language has suffered a dramatic decline of the number of speakers in Iparralde (northern side in France) in the last decades. At the European level, the Basque language is recognized as a "European language" but not a "Communitaria language", so it is not an official language of the Union.
 
A language may be lost due to the fact that the people who know that language do not speak it anymore.  It should be asked though, why a person whose mother tongue being Basque does not express him/herself in that language any longer.  The answer may be found in a highly perjudicial language policy at both the Spanish and the French national level.