Basque Country

Key Findings overall

It seems that the Basque Country exhibits comparatively strong multilingual profiles in primary and secondary education for Spanish, Basque and the main foreign languages (with English in top position). However, immigrant languages, for instance, have a very weak or non existent presence in the educational system.

In higher education, printed media, public services and private companies, multilingual profiles are emerging at quite a fast rate. This shall be improved and consolidated in the future by the development of an adequate educational basis oriented towards multilingualism.

Promising initiatives and pilots

Multilingualism is a challenge for a society which is far from being 100% bilingual. The gradual move towards a bilingual society must therefore be combined with the growing need and demand for multilingual strategies. One of these strategies is already on track: a pilot has been developed to introduce a trilingual framework into primary and secondary education. Around 120 schools have adopted this new framework, which will probably extend to the entire educational system eventually.

Within the realm of new technologies, a big effort is currently being directed towards creating a machine-translation system that can translate texts and websites from Spanish and English to Basque and vice versa. This new tool will be based on a powerful grammatical analyser and a big public repository of translation memories.

The goal of these (and other) initiatives is not easy to achieve, but it is, at the same time, a very attractive one: to develop and strengthen multilingual profiles in a society that wants and is trying to increase the use of Basque, the socio-linguistically weakest language.