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A language related to nothing, and a museum that changed a city
Basque is the outstanding linguistic fact of western Europe. Every other language spoken natively in Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Britain belongs to the Indo-European family; Basque does not belong to any family at all. It is a language isolate — no demonstrated relationship to any other language, living or recorded — and it was spoken in the western Pyrenees before Latin arrived and survived the Roman period, which nothing else in the peninsula did. Attempts to link it to Caucasian languages, to Iberian, to Berber have all failed to convince. The honest position is that nobody knows. It is co-official in the Basque Autonomous Community and in the Basque-speaking parts of Navarre, and it has been through a sharp recovery: heavily suppressed under the Franco dictatorship, it was standardised in the 1960s as euskara batua — unified Basque — and has since been rebuilt through the ikastolas and the education system. Roughly a third of the population of the Basque Country can now speak it, and the proportion is far higher among the young than among their grandparents, which is the reverse of what is happening to most minority languages in Europe. It is also genuinely difficult, and not because it is exotic. It is ergative, agglutinative, and has a case system and a verb that agrees with several arguments at once. None of that resembles Spanish, and nobody will expect you to have learned any. What they will notice is a greeting: kaixo for hello, eskerrik asko for thank you, agur for goodbye. That is the whole investment required, and it is received warmly. As for the museum: the Guggenheim opened in 1997 on derelict industrial land on the Nervión estuary, in a city that had lost its shipyards and steel and had a reputation for rain, pollution and political violence. Frank Gehry's titanium building drew visitors in numbers nobody had forecast, and el efecto Guggenheim entered the international vocabulary of urban policy as shorthand for culture-led regeneration. The shorthand is worth some scepticism — the museum came alongside a metro, a cleaned-up river, new bridges and a decade of coordinated investment, and cities that have built a landmark and expected the rest to follow have mostly been disappointed. Bilbao did the other things too.