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Spoken in small parts of northern Spain and France, Basque is one of the most interesting languages in the world because unlike every other language in Europe, Basque is a language isolate, meaning it has no known relation to any other language family. French, Italian, and even more obscure European languages like the Romance language Occitan or the Celtic language Breton are all related and linguists can trace their respective histories.

But many scholars think that the Basque language actually descends from an ancient stratum of Paleolithic hunter gatherers in Europe and is the only surviving representative of indigenous European tribes before Indo-European language families like the Germanic and Romance came to dominate the continent and eventually the entire world. So I recently went to Bilbao, the capital of Spanish Basque Country, to try to practice this ancient European language, although due to centuries of suppression most people here do not actually speak Basque. And to be honest this was a really hard language to learn and I’m not very good either … but it was kind of fun to get a lot of attention when I tried speaking it!

0:00 Intro
1:07 Sponsored by Factor
2:08 Trying to buy cheese speaking Basque
3:37 “He speaks more Basque than me”
4:45 They want to come home with me
7:59 Trying polvorón for the first time
9:15 “But why are you learning Basque?”

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