Late Basquisation - Main Current Theories

Main Current Theories

The Basque language is a language isolate that has survived the arrival of Indo-European languages in western Europe.

There are two main hypotheses concerning the historical geographical spread of the Basque language:

• That Basque has occupied its current homeland (western Pyrenees, coinciding with the territories of Navarra and the Autonomous community of the Basque Country) in Spain since prehistory;
• That the end of the Roman Republic and during the first hundreds of years of the Empire, migration of Basque-speakers from Aquitaine overlapped with an autochthonous population whose most ancient substrate would be Indo-European. The migration is alleged to have increased, with peaks in the 6th and 7th centuries.

The latter hypothesis, known as the late Basquisation of the Western Basque areas has been defended by historians and philologists such as Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, Manuel Gómez Moreno, Jürgen Untermann and Francisco Villar. The Basque-Spanish linguist Koldo Mitxelena raised important objections against that hypothesis; however, recent archaeological findings of Aquitanian morphology (as it is presumed by the analysis performed by such authors as Agustín Azkarate, Iñaki García Camino, Mikel Unzueta, and others) point to an important migration dated in the 5th-6th centuries and give the theory a new lease of life.

In his 2008 book Historia de las Lenguas de Europa (History of the Languages of Europe), the Spanish philologist and hellenist Francisco Rodríguez Adrados has updated the debate by arguing that the Basque language is older in Aquitaine than in the Spanish Basque country, and it now inhabits its current territory because of pressure of the Celtic invasions.