Standard Basque

Standard Basque (Basque: euskara batua, lit. 'unified Basque') is a standardised version of the Basque language, developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s, which nowadays is the most widely and commonly spoken Basque-language version throughout the Basque Country. Heavily based on the literary tradition of the central areas (Gipuzkoan and Lapurdian dialects), it is the version of the language that is commonly used in education at all levels, from elementary school to university, on television and radio, and in the vast majority of all written production in Basque.^[1]

It is also used in common parlance by new speakers that have not learnt any local dialect, especially in the cities, whereas in the countryside, with more elderly speakers, people remain attached to the natural dialects to a higher degree, especially in informal situations; i.e. Basque traditional dialects are still used in the situations where they always were used (native Basque speakers speaking in informal situations), while batua has conquered new fields for the Basque language: the formal situations (where Basque was seldom used, apart from religion) and a lot of new speakers that otherwise would not have learned Basque.

Euskara batua enjoys official language status in Spain (in the whole Basque Autonomous Community and in the northern sections of Navarre) but remains unrecognised as an official language in France, the only language officially recognised by that country being French.