Basque Studies and Beyond: A Brief Presentation of this Special Issue

Abstract

It is for us a great pleasure to present this special issue on Basque Studies.1 The Etxepare Basque Institute had the great pleasure to foster the creation of a Basque Language and Culture lectureship at the University of Liverpool in 2012, a lectureship that became a permanent position in 2014 and that together with the creation of the Manuel Irujo Research Fellowship back in 2013, located the University of Liverpool as the leading academic institution in Basque Studies in the British context. All these facts and achievements will help us to reflect in the following lines on the international academic map of Basque Studies, as well as on the particular shape this map has taken in different countries. A brief presentation of the articles and contributors included in this special issue will complete this foreword.Basque Studies Around the WorldEncouraged by the benefits that he saw in the invention of the printing press for the diffusion of a small literature like that in Basque, Bernard Etxepare, the writer of the first book published in Basque, Linguae Vasconum Primitiae (1545) exhorted, 'Euskara, jalgi hadi mundura!' [Basque language, set out into the world!], thereby declaring his strong desire that our language should hold a place in the Republic of Letters. Etxepare's verses have inspired public institutions such as the abovementioned Instituto Vasco Etxepare/ Etxepare Euskal Institutua/ Etxepare Basque Institute2 created by the Basque government in 2007 and functioning since 2010, with the goal of promoting and diffusing the Basque language and culture internationally. The institute encourages spaces of interaction with other languages and communities, and sets up international academic programmes to better understand and research the Basque language and culture. This work involves a network of university lecturers, grants for students on these courses, chairs of Basque Studies for visiting professors and education focused on training Basque language lecturers. Furthermore, the Institute participates in top-level international language fairs, such as the Language Show in London, and organizes numerous events related to the language, approaching and informing foreign institutions and individuals about the Basque language and its reality.The Etxepare Basque Institute now has agreements with 41 international universities in 17 countries (including 12 in the Americas; 23 in Europe, and 1 in Asia); and there are 29 Basque language and culture lecturers at universities all over the world. Around 2,800 students were enrolled in Basque language and culture courses in the 2014-2015 academic year. The Etxepare Basque Institute has to date created 9 international university chairs at American and European universities, all of which undertake annual academic programmes on Basque Studies, mainly at the postgraduate level.The cartography of Basque Studies around the world reveals a field whose worldwide implementation has been quite limited. With the exception of the William Douglass Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, in the United States, founded (as the Basque Studies Program) in 1967,3 the remaining Basque Studies centres, such as IKER (Centre de Recherche sur la Langue et les Textes Basques; UMR 5478), which is based in Baiona (Bayonne, Department of the Atlantic Pyrenees, Aquitaine, France), are located in Basquespeaking territory. Moreover, a glance at the cartography of the international teaching of Basque Studies outside the Basque Country reveals that, to date, only five universities in Spain (Salamanca, Complutense, UNED, the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and the Universitat de Barcelona) and two in France (the Universite Bordeaux-Montaigne and Universite de Pau and the Pays de l'Adour) have tenured professors in Basque Studies. To these one should add the abovementioned permanent position at the University of Liverpool created with our help in 2014, and the four faculty members at the CBS, plus the four faculty members at Boise State University, Idaho, in the United States. …