Nearly none of the young men and women who immigrated to the United States from the Basque County to herd sheep in the American West had any knowledge of English. This wasn’t much of a problem as they typically worked with other Basques. However, encounters with the dominant language of their new home were unavoidable and sometimes represented concepts that they didn’t have a Basque word for, so they simply transliterated the English word into Basque spelling. This leads to an interesting collection of “Basqlish” words.

Updated: I’ve added new words as they’ve been suggested. Those from Joxe are in bold, others are in regular text. I’ve also removed the hidden text.

• Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, who has done extensive research on Basque arboglyphs, has uncovered a number of transliterations of English words to Basque. Some of these will be familiar to those who had a Basque parent – you can almost hear their accent coming through. He shared these with me after I wished him Happy Thanksgiving.
• Here are a few of Joxe’s favorites, with a few others from visitors.

A full list of all of Buber’s Basque Facts of the Week can be found in the Archive.

Primary sources: Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, private communication