Two more points about Euskara that I wanted to mention.

First, Renee Marticorena sent me a note about UNESCO‘s new classification of Euskara as unsafe.  They have an interactive atlas of languages in danger, which is interesting in its own right, but, with regards to Euskara, shows it to be in an unsafe position in Spain and France.

This is even more troubling in light of the article that Graham Smith pointed me to on Eurolang.net‘s site.  That article describes how the new government of the Basque Autonomous Community, formed by a coalition of the PP and PSOE and lead by Patxi Lopez of the PSOE, will reverse some of the language policy of the previous Basque Nationalist Party governments, putting an unsafe language in further jeopardy.

Why is it important to preserve languages? Linguist Christopher Moseley gives his thoughts.