The dialects of Basque in the seven Basque provinces (1863)

This map was created by French philologist Louis Lucien Bonaparte and published by Stanfords in London in 1863.

Louis Lucien Bonaparte was one of the first philologists to devote himself to the study of languages through linguistic comparison. In 1856, he began studying Basque and, after several trips to the region, created this map showing the regions of the different dialects he defined.

The map shows the seven Basque provinces, four in Spain (Biscay, Guipúzcoa, Álava and Navarre) and three in France (Labort, Lower Navarre and Sola). The different colours represent the eight dialects in Bonaparte's classification:

• Biscay, in red.
• Guipuzcoan, in blue.
• Northern Altonavarro, in yellow.
• Southern Altonavarro, in green.
• Labortano, in orange.
• Western Lower Navarre, in purple.
• Eastern Lower Navarre, in brown.
• Suletino, in light brown (although it is marked as purple in the legend).

This dialectal classification of Basque continued to be used until 1998, when Koldo Zuazo updated and modernised the classification to establish three main groups, eight dialects and twenty-five subdialects.

Sources

• Map of the Seven Basque Provinces, showing the current boundaries of the Euskara language