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Aritz Farwell. A majority looked upon it as ill-suited to the exigencies of the contemporary world because they believed it unfit to communicate the new ideas of the era. Basque's incapacity in this respect was not generally considered intrinsic to the language—although that view was held by some. The impression was shaped, rather, by the belief that Basque was neither a language of culture or science, nor one that might serve as a lingua franca for a significant amount of people. The notions that animated the modern world spirit were seen to reside in only a handful of languages and it was understood that Basque, unlike Spanish or French, was not one of these.

This vision of Basque was fruit of a narrative that had developed over the course of centuries. One chapter in that story depicted Basque as both the source and the evidence for a Basque distinctiveness that had endured unbroken throughout time. As empires rose and fell the Basques had remained in their Edenic corner of the Earth, untouched by forces that corrupted and engulfed other peoples.  Ancient Basque, unique in structure and unrelated to other languages, was held largely responsible for having kept alive and pure one of humanity's original societies.  But another part of the story, written mostly in the nineteenth century, turned this perspective on its head.  It identified Basque and the people that spoke it as remnants of a primitive and backward culture. In this telling, Basque had not adapted over time. Willfully forgotten by the urban well-to-do, in disrepair and surviving only as the rude tongue of the country folk, it was said Basque was destined to be washed away by the coming tide of modernity.

Thus, by the start of the twentieth century, Basque progressives, those seeking greater social change at a faster pace, fretted over the perceived barrier that regional languages such as Basque threw up against the spread of new knowledge. While many professed a desire to safeguard these languages, they were also adamant about the need to remove them as obstacles to the circulation of modern concepts, the solidification of what they considered rational centralized government, or even, in some cases, the ultimate goal of a unified human society. As one writer put it in 1904, dissolving the boundary produced by Basque would ensure that those "plunged in the thickest spiritual blackness at the heart of Europe" had access to "universal life". For, like the tribes described by Henry Morton Stanley in the "virgin lands of Africa," Basque sheltered people living isolated in the Basque Country from "the winds of liberty which blow from the outside."

Conservatives, more apprehensive about unfettered change, feared modern social norms would finally obliterate what was termed the Basque personality. They welcomed the thought that Basque might provide some measure of protection from what they often characterized as false and immoral progress. There was hope that Basque's perceived antagonism to modern-day life might block foreign ideas from reaching ‘real' Basques, or at least offer a means to shield Basque authenticity as this new world seeped in about them. Within the movement that sprung up to conserve Basque and the Basque personality, some plainly wished to return the language to the imagined purity that it possessed when the world was young and the Basques innocent of wicked inclinations.  Basque would help seal the people off from outside contamination. Others sought to repair its linguistic body and social prestige so that it could one day succeed as a language of culture.  But in either case, most believed Basque's current state made it adverse to modernity.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, this attitude no longer obtains with any significance.  Certainly, because Basque is a minority language in a bilingual society, Basques must contend with how to find a balance in diverse social spheres between the languages they speak—as was true a hundred years before.  This can and does lead to conflict.  Nonetheless, there is something remarkable about the shift in perspective that has occurred with respect to Basque. The wheel of time has turned:  once cast as incompatible with the present, Basque now inhabits every niche of contemporary life. It moves within the currents of our time apace of the people who speak it.

(This article is derived from the PhD dissertation, 'Borne Before the Moone: A Social and Political History of Basque at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century', supervised by Ludger Mees and presented at the Department of Contemporary History, School of Social Sciences, University of the Basque Country)