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Unai Zaballa, Amaia Valpais, Patxi Laskurain, and Alessia Leoni organized the first meeting last Wednesday, March the 4^th, at the Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois. As Zaballa told EuskalKultura.com, “we wanted to see whether people would be interested on taking Basque language classes and we’re very happy with their response.” Ten students attended the meeting, besides the four organizers. Now, their plan is to attract more people through social activities and, eventually, start teaching Basque at the academic institution.

Normal, IL. At a presentation where attendees also had the opportunity to eat pintxos, the organizers explained the reason to create the new group and also gave the attendees information about the Basque Country and Euskara. “We think it is important to give visibility to minority languages in the department of Linguistics, and not just to stick to the most spoken ones,” said Zaballa, himself a master student of Linguistics at the Illinois State University. In the meeting, they used videos and even taught some basic words in Basque and, as stated by Zaballa, “people showed real interest; they were taking notes and asking questions.”

The head of the linguistics department had told the organizing group that the university’s previous attempts to include Japanese and Portuguese classes had not been as successful as expected, so right now they are not thinking of starting a Basque program, at least, anytime soon. Things being so, Zaballa, Valpais, Laskurain, and Leoni decided to do it themselves: They contacted NABO’s Euskara coordinators, Itxaso Cayero and Aitor Iñarra, and Ander Caballero, the Basque Autonomous Government’s representative in New York, and after that they decided to go ahead and schedule this first meeting.

Next steps

The next step will be to organize a pintxo workshop at the university, since culinary events tend to be successful, in the words of Zaballa. It will be on April 15 and they expect to attract more students willing to know about their activities.

Depending on the amount of people gathered, they might also organize a Korrika, or Basque fun run in support of Euskara, to be celebrated some days later. “We know it will almost be the end of the academic year, but if everything goes well, we might give some classes before the end of the semester and, after summer, start up a full program,” said Zaballa.

Who are they?

Zaballa is a linguistics student from Getxo and Valpais a literature student from Gernika (both in Bizkaia). Patxi Laskurain, originally from Donostia-San Sebastian, capital city of Gipuzkoa, works as a professor at the Linguistics department. And Leoni is an italian student of pedagogy.

Although the organization shares the name with the Argentine Artaburu Euskaltzale Elkartea, Zaballa told EuskalKultura.com that he got to know about them after coming up with a name for their group. “There are a lot of corn fields in this area, so we thought it would be a good idea to make that connection between here and the Basque Country,” he finished.