What makes Basque so hard?

Many thanks to bunj for asking me some weeks back if I could work on a language "related in an unspecified way to Basque" for a fantasy setting he'd been kicking around for some time. (This is the one that also required a variant Spanish; there are examples of what I came up with for both in an invented legend based loosely on the story of Our Lady of Guadelupe.) This gave me an excuse to pick up some books I had largely neglected since acquiring them. The dictionary was a real coup; I think the cover price was something like $75, but I bought it for 50% off at Europa Books' going-out-of-business. I also received a copy of Colloquial Basque, which I'd hardly ever looked at.

There's a Spanish saying that the Devil spent ten years in the Basque Country and, when he left, he had learned only the words for "yes" and "no". (Want to be cooler than the Devil? "Yes" is bai, "no" is ez. Agur is a greeting and a leavetaking in the north; in the south, it means "bye" and "hello" is kaixo. You now know twice as much Basque as he does!) The complexity of the Basque language is folkloric--but is it real? What is it about this language that makes it so hard?

As with all languages, it's a combination of intrinsic characteristics and attitudes. We have no scientific measure for the "complexity" of a language, just some rules of thumb, but I think they're trumped by people's attitudes anyway. Take Chinese. My father officiated at a wedding recently where most of the attendees were Chinese-speakers. Inevitably, there was a discussion at his table about the relative difficulty of Chinese and English. The bilingual guests were unanimous in pronouncing Chinese much harder to learn. I dispute this; when it comes to learning languages, difficulty is relative. The more a foreign language resembles your own, the easier it will be for you to learn. (This may be one reason why English-speakers tend to consider all foreign languages difficult: English has no close relatives that are recognised as world languages.) I pointed out several factors that were skewing their judgement.

The major one is probably the fact that learning patterns are asymmetrical. That is, plenty of Chinese-speakers learn English, but relatively few English-speakers (or speakers of European languages in general) learn any Chinese dialect. An obvious conclusion to draw from this is that Chinese is harder. Otherwise, why don't more people learn it? Obvious and wrong, because it begs the question of why people learn languages in the first place. Again, Zompist has put together a solid essay attempting to answer this. (Rest assured, Gentle Readers, like Chomsky, his linguistics are far more sound than his politics.) It is summed up in the statement: "Languages take immense effort to learn, and people will only learn them if it's socially or economically inescapable."

For Chinese speakers, learning English means access to the world's premier educational system and--next to immigrating to country with a much higher standard of living (which English is also generally an aid to)--no single factor improves your average earning power more than education. It also means access to foreigners in China, to foreign culture, and a great many other desirable things. By contrast, what does an American gain by learning Chinese? Mostly intangibles. People tend to do it because they fall in love with the culture (or someone who belongs to it), but that's just not motivation enough even for members of the educated elite of this country, much less the average person.

This means that, when native Chinese-speakers speak of the ease of English and challenge of Chinese, there are relatively few people with the expertise to disagree. And, although bragging is considered very bad form by the Chinese, people take an almost perverse pride in speaking a language widely thought impossible. So they have every reason to deny the difficulty of learning English (since it's a skill they've acquired personally) and affirm the difficulty of Chinese (since it's something they picked up without conscious effort). Really, it's a covert form of bragging, encouraged by the fact that they have lots of polite English-speakers complimenting them on their mastery of English and a number of would-be Chinese learners who complain about how hard the language is. This only confirms the shared prejudice of English- and Chinese-speakers.

All of this is operative in the Basque case as well. Virtually all Basque-speakers learn Spanish or French, but--until relatively recently--almost no non-Basques learned Basque. They had no need to and they were put off by the reputation of Basque, a reputation the Basques themselves have done little to demystify. They're a little like Eskimos. The most banal fact of language--that the more people deal with a certain thing, the more terms they're apt to use for various aspects of it--becomes, somehow, a fact worth marvelling at when repeated of them. It's always hard to learn a foreign language. It's just that this somehow gains significance when applied to the language of the "oldest living people in Europe" or whatever misleading superlative you want to give to the Basques.

Next up: What makes Basque so cool.