The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [130]
Taking into account the entire population gives little Soule, which has attracted few outsiders and, for that matter, has few locals, the highest percentage of Basque speakers, and gives Labourd, where retired Parisians have taken up residence by the beach, and Navarra, where half the province is no longer culturally Basque, the lowest ratios of Basque speakers. In all seven provinces, retirees and Castilians included, 37 percent of people speak some Euskera, but only 25 percent are completely fluent. This would mean that slightly more than 600,000 people speak fluent Euskera, though more than 800,000 speak some Euskera. Among that additional 200,000 are many people who are in the process of learning the language.
But what is of deep concern is that while the percentage of Euskera speakers is dramatically rising on the Spanish side, it is declining on the French side. Basques hold their territory by language, and there is a risk of completely losing the French Basque provinces. This would be the first significant loss of Basque territory since the late Roman Empire.
Until the abolition of the Fueros, Euskera was surviving far better under Spanish rule than under the French. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Hugo found the Basque language to be almost a religion, it was spoken by only about one-third of the population in the French provinces where he was visiting, whereas in 1867, more than 96 percent of the residents of Guipúzcoa spoke Basque.
In Spanish Basqueland, the number of Basque speakers declined under Franco and has risen to twentieth-century heights since his death. Despite the seventy commandos and the 15,000 police, this is one of the best moments Spanish Basques have ever had. Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Alava, home to almost three-fourths of the Basque population, are undergoing a dramatic change. Among the population born before 1932, 28 percent speak Euskera. Among those born at the height of Franco’s repression, when teaching Euskera to your children meant labeling them as “troublemakers,” only 21 percent speak it. But since 1972, the percentage of fluent Basque speakers has steadily increased. Bilingual schooling is the common practice, and if trends continue, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa will soon have a Basque-speaking majority.
The Basque Nationalist Party government of the three provinces has taken over the education system, completely turning around the fate of the Basque language. Once a whispered rarity, Euskera is now commonly heard, not only in rural villages but on the streets of major cities. Even in Bilbao, one of the least Basque-speaking towns, Euskera is regularly heard. Having the language in common usage pressures increasing numbers of Spanish Basques to learn it. Among school-age Basques in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya, it is the lingua franca.
In the French provinces, or Northern Basqueland, as it is known in the government documents of Southern Basqueland, 37 percent of those born before 1932 speak Basque, but only 11 percent of those born between 1972 and 1980 do. Obviously, a language spoken predominantly by older people has a dubious future. And yet there are a number of reasons for French Basques not to despair. The percentage of Basque speakers in France has been rising recently because Euskera education in schools was legalized under Mitterrand and because, in 1980, volunteers began a program based on the ikastolas to the south.
Spanish Basques have their own Basque governments that run school systems, finance programs, publish materials, and promote Basque culture. It is difficult for French Basques not to gaze covetously at the Basque governments in Spain which share their publishing, radio, and television with the north, where there are not enough public funds to have the equivalent programs.
Since the French Revolution, the Basques of France have had no entity of their own in French administration.