World Language Map

Where is Basque spoken?

Basque (Euskara) is a language isolate, spoken in Spain and France. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Basque is spoken

Basque is spoken in 2 countries: Spain and France. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Spain2%945,608
France0.1%88,887

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Basque is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Basque.

How many people speak Basque?

Wikidata gives about 750,000 speakers (mintzaira.fr, 2016). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Threatened. Glottolog lists it as threatened: it is still spoken by all generations, but there are signs that the number of speakers is falling.

Where Basque sits in the language family tree

Basque is a language isolate: Glottolog knows of no language that it is demonstrably related to.

More about Basque

Codes: ISO 639-3 eus, Glottolog basq1248. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Basque

Where is Basque spoken?

Basque is spoken in Spain and France. Unicode CLDR puts it at 2% of the population of Spain, which is about 945,608 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Basque?

Wikidata gives about 750,000 speakers (mintzaira.fr, 2016). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Is Basque related to any other language?

Glottolog lists Basque as a language isolate: a language with no demonstrated relatives. It sits on its own in the classification.

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