Origin of The Basques

Origin Of The Basques

The origin of the Basques and the Basque language is a controversial topic that has given place to numerous hypotheses about their origin and so far none of them is conclusive or has been completely proven. A notorious fact is that the ancient language of the Basque people, the Basque language, which developed from the Proto-Basque language, is the only Pre-Indo-European language to have survived into contemporary times. The current Basque language is a language isolate. The Basques have long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe. However, this assumption has come under increasing criticism as genetic and linguistic studies have become more sophisticated. No firm conclusion has been reached on their origins.

The main hypothesis about the origin of the Basques are:

• The Native origin, according to which the Basque language would have developed over the millennia entirely between the north of the Iberian Peninsula and the current south of France, without the possibility of finding any kind of relationship between the Basque language and other modern languages in other regions.
• The Basque-Iberism, which theorizes the existence of a demonstrable close kinship between the Basque and the Iberian language, and therefore between their speakers.
• The Caucasian origin, based on linguistic evidence similar to that of the Basque-Iberism, as the Basque language and the Caucasian languages share some linguistic typologies absent in the Indo-European languages.
• The Afro-Asian origin, now obsolete, according to which the Basque languages share some remote kinship with the Berber languages or even the Phoenician language.