Basque

Basque, whose speakers call it Euskara, is the language of the Basque Country on the western Pyrenees, straddling northern Spain and southwestern France, and is Europe's only living language isolate; most scholars regard it as the survivor of a language spoken before the Indo-European languages reached the region. Its grammar has agglutinative word-building and an ergative-absolutive case system, though its vocabulary contains Latin and later Spanish and French loanwords.

The oldest coherent Basque sentences survive in the San Millán glosses of about 950, but a written literature began only in the sixteenth century: the Mexico bishop Juan de Zumárraga wrote the earliest surviving prose in 1537.

Bernard Etxepare printed the first Basque book, Linguæ Vasconum Primitiæ, in 1545. The Protestant priest Joanes Leizarraga published a Basque New Testament in 1571 at the request of Jeanne d'Albret, queen of Navarre.