The Economist reports on a little-known linguistic enclave (archived):
Introducing House Bill 561 to the Idaho Legislature, Ted Hill did not expect to stoke international controversy. The law, which originally banned local governments from flying the flags of non-states, was intended to stop Boise from flying the gay-pride flag. Earlier this year the president of the Basque Country, an autonomous region in Spain, sent a letter expressing concern about the effect HB 561 might have on the flying of the Ikurrina, the Basque flag, during Jaialdi, the 40,000-person Basque festival the city hosts every five years. Worried about flagging support for the bill, Representative Hill offered the Basques a carve-out for the Ikurrina.
Speakers of the language first came during California’s gold rush, then moved from mining to sheep herding. By 1900 chain migration saw nephews follow uncles as Basque shepherds spread across federal land. They carved 25,000 Basque-language messages into trees across the West. Some with Basque ancestry tried to shed it. “My great-grandparents’ generation said, ‘Learn English, don’t speak Basque.’ But my mom’s generation worked to get Basque back,” says Olaia Urquidi Beals of Txantxangorriak, a musical group. On Tuesday nights they gather with trikis (accordions) and panderos (tambourines) and sing in Basque. Afterwards, some musicians visit Ansots Basque Chorizos & Catering around the corner. Just down the road is Boiseko Ikastola, America’s only Basque-language pre-school.
There was a time, in the late 1970s, when it looked as if the language and culture would fade away, says Dave Bieter, a former mayor of Boise. Now when he plays Mus, a Basque card game, he says a third of players speak Basque. There are about 40 Basque clubs in America, mostly in the West. Jainkoak Amerika bedeinka dezala!
(That last exclamation means, according to GT, “God bless America!”) Thanks go to cuchuflete for what he calls a “superficial puff piece” but I call a fun bit of language fluff. Also, I’m glad to know there’s such a thing as a Basque-language pre-school in Idaho.
I think of neighboring Nevada (the rural parts, not Vegas) as the key Basque-American locale, but Nevada’s population has grown so fast in recent decades that in percentage terms Idaho apparently now has more B-A’s. Although the most politically-powerful scion of the Basque-shepherd diaspora probably still belongs to Nevada (the late Paul Laxalt, who served two terms in the U.S. Senate after one term as governor).
So what happened with the bill? Did they amend it so that local governments shall be allowed to fly non-state flags, as long as they aren’t icky?
I think this may be the amended text that got enacted: https://legiscan.com/ID/text/H0561/id/3404387/Idaho-2026-H0561-Engrossed.pdf
They passed the bill. As enacted, it bans local governments from flying any flags other than the U.S. flag; state flags; city or county flags, but only if they were adopted before 1/1/2023; flags of the U.S. military services; the POW/MIA flag; flags of recognized tribes; official flags of Idaho colleges or universities; “official flags of countries other than the United States to commemorate special occasions or in recognition of historic international and cross-border relations, including the Basque autonomous community flag as recognized as an official flag by the Spanish government, but excluding countries with which the United States is engaged in hostile action”; and then what looks like a giant carve-out allowing “flags along streets or boulevards that are not political, religious, or ideological in nature.” https://legislature.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/sessioninfo/2026/legislation/H0561E2.pdf
Your tax dollars at work (if you live in Idaho, anyway).
Edit: I see that J.W. Brewer beat me to it , , ,
What they may not have permitted (although I don’t know if this is politically salient in Idaho …) is FORMER flags of “countries other than the United States” that are favored by diasporic communities in the U.S. who quite understandably dislike the current regime in the relevant old country. Here’s one you often see in diasporic contexts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Vietnam and here’s another https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_and_Sun_flag (Idk if there are e.g. Ethiopian-Americans who favor a historical flag not used by the current authorities in power in Addis Ababa, but it wouldn’t surprise me.)
That said, one can imagine reasons why a state government might not want its various municipalities freelancing in this particular area of emigre politics, and the law does not prohibit any private citizen from displaying whatever flag they want on their own property or, I should think, from waving whatever flag they wish in a parade down a public street in a context where it’s clear that the flag-waving is not being done by the government-as-such.
Being a long-time inland Northwesterner and having lived in the border regions of both states bracketing the Idaho Panhandle, I didn’t realize this was obscure. I only knew of them historically though; I didn’t realize there was such a strong cultural presence in Boise still.
These days all the shepherds and goatherds are Peruvian for some reason. If you’re an orchardist or herder in the intermountain West it’s best to know some Spanish, but for entirely different groups. The folks working the fields and orchards are almost entirely laborers from Mexico or Central America, but the specialist goat herders (and even all the hands that I’ve met) are South American.
Now I’m curious as to whether there are any Basque-Americans who disdain the conventional modern “Basque Community flag” as representing too wimpy a nationalism and prefer the conjecturally-reconstructed flag of the medieval Kingdom of Navarre (Nafarroako Erresuma), hoping to get Idahoan backing in ending the current occupation of its onetime territory by the French and Spanish authorities.
What happens if the United States engages in hostile action with the Basque Country?
What happens if the United States engages in hostile action with the Basque Country?
Thanks for softball question.
The Basques will call upon a few of their better jai alai players, humiliate some Marines, blockade the St. Lawrence Seaway for a non-negligible sum, etc. The bloviation regime will bluster, declare victory, and try to force all civil servants to sign NDAs, thus relinquishing basic Constitutional rights. Luncheon will include a vegan option.
This part because the last year’s less restrictive version was met with a city council voting to make the progress pride flag an official city flag…
What happens if the United States engages in hostile action with the Basque Country?
Lamb will be renamed “Freedom beef”.
The Bay of Biscay will be renamed the Bay of America.
Some in Brittany will say it’s really the Bay of Armorica.
La diferencia obvia lingüística entre vascongadas y albóndigas permanece. Hasta en Boise.
Euskera!
in honor of Basque cuisine, with a drop of North American inspiration…
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/world/europe/basque-cheesecake-inventor-rivera-spain.html
A sign of what’s important to people today: I looked up “Laxalt” on Google, and was treated to two pages of articles about a Uruguayan footballer before I reached the late governer and senator. Anyway, I looked him up because it didn’t seem very obviously a Basque name to me. In Chile many of the wealthy land-owning families go in for names like Errazuriz, Irarrazaval and Eyzaguirre that shout Basque immediately.
What happened to that well-known book, ‘Scouting for Boise’? Has the Town Hall banned that as well?
AC-B: Sen./Gov. Laxalt retired from public life almost four decades ago, so his name may not come up very often in non-historical contexts. So much time has gone by in Nevada politics that his grandson Adam Laxalt has now himself tried but failed to be elected governor (2018) and U.S. senator (2022).
Adam Laxalt was fathered by New Mexico senator Pete Domenici, who had an extramarital affair with Nevada senator Paul Laxalt’s daughter Michelle while she was working as an aide to Alaska senator Ted Stevens. (I happened to learn that this morning, entirely by coincidence.)
Spot the ergative and the absolutive!
Day saved, no inaccuracies detected.
I’ve read of that one.
Laxalt is apparently a variant of Lazalde ~ Lasalde, lit. ‘riverside’.
We’re really supposed to believe that it’s pure coincidence that Brett supposedly learned about Adam Laxalt’s parentage on the very same day the N.Y. Times just happens to be highlighting so-called Basque cheesecake?
Speaking of conspiracies, I just recalled (although I had known it previously) that back in 2022 the Biden Administration removed the ETA from the U.S. State Department’s official list of formally-designated “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” The ETA had been one of the OG FTO’s designated in the very first iteration of the list back in 1997, simultaneously with such all-timers as Hamas, the Shining Path, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. I am guessing the 2022 delisting was based on a conclusion that the ETA’s self-proclaimed 2018 dissolution had been real rather than a ruse?
Could be a diminutive*, though it’s interesting that both z and s exist in this word.
* Formed by palatalizing the alveolar consonants. [c], spelled tt in analogy to ll, exists only in diminutives.
Basques were brought in with H-2A work visas (temporary agricultural workers), which is exempt from federal minimum wage requirements. Until about 10 years ago, they were paid just over $3 / hour for a regular workweek with no accounting for overtime. The herd owners justified it by arguing that they provided trailers and basic food for free. For the immigrants the justification was, of course, the perspective of green cards.
Later on, the wage rates doubled (and in California, almost tripled due to state laws). Still, with the conditions in the Basque country not so dire anymore, the Basques stopped coming for sheepherding. Now it’s the Peruvians and, occasionally, Chileans. The list of countries qualifying for H-2A status remained very limited in all these years…
Elko NV is claiming to be the biggest Basque cultural center in the US, but all I personally experienced from it was a not-so-impressive restaurant dinner…
J.W. Brewer: The U.S. government removed a bunch of no-longer-active groups from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list in May 2022, including Aum Shinrikyo (four years after Shoko Asahara’s execution). If one were looking for a conspiracy theory, the organization to focus on might be Kahane Chai / Kach. Only a few months after the Biden administration removed it from the list in May 2022, Itamir Ben-Gvir (who had been Kach’s youth coordinator) became Israel’s Minister of National Security.
From Basques in the Philippines, by Marciano R. de Borja (U. Nevada Press, 2012):
Today most Filipinos are very familiar with two things related to Basque culture, though without knowing it—chorizo de Bilbao, a kind of sausage, and jai alai. At the same time, the Basque legacy in the Philippines is perhaps manifested most obviously in the number of Basque place-names. Many of Manila’s streets still have Basque names, though many more have been erased and changed in recent years for the sake of modernization and nationalism. The most obvious example is Avenida Azcárraga, which was renamed Claro M. Recto Avenue in honor of the great Filipino nationalist and senator. Among the surviving Basque street names are Ayala, Arlegui, Barrengoa, Bilbao, Gaztambide, Ozcariz, Elizondo, Guernica, Durango, Echague, Goiti, and Mendiola. In Makati, the posh residential and business enclaves are called Legazpi, Salcedo, and Urdaneta.
The current map of the Philippines is still replete with provinces, towns, and cities that bear Basque names, such as Anda, Arteche, Azpeita, Lavezares, Legazpi, Loyola, Mondragon, Nueva Vizcaya, Oroquieta, Oteiza, Pamplona, Urbistondo, Urdaneta, Zarraga, and Zumarraga.
Many Basques went overseas as missionaries, the most famous being the Navarrese Francis Xavier.
It was only after the successful expedition of Legazpi and Urdaneta [both Basques] in 1565 that the Catholic Church was permanently established in the Philippines, starting in Cebu. Urdaneta brought with him to the Philippines a contingent of fellow Augustinian missionaries, all of whom were Basques. Andrés de Aguirre, Pedro de Gamboa, Diego de Herrera, and Martín de Rada. Actually, Lorenzo Jiménez, a non-Basque, was also enlisted by Urdaneta, but he died in the port of Navidad before the expedition disembarked. Thus the Basques became the real pioneers in preaching the gospel and teaching catechism in the archipelago.
Interesting stuff, thanks! I guess Basques, like Hungarians, are everywhere.
Oh. Basques will be everywhere, I guess.
Basques will be everywhere
probably not surprising given their outsize role in seafaring exploration in the centuries before Urdaneta discovered the famous Transpacific galleon route from the Philippines to Acapulco (prior to that, Philippines were a completely impractical Spanish possession because the known return routes – through the Indian ocean – legally belonged to Portugal).
The Basques have become great ocean explorers due to their whaling industry, attested since medieval times. With the exhaustion of the whales in the nearby seas, they expanded across the Atlantic (some claim that it happened even before Columbus).
But what may be surprising is that it wasn’t just a one-direction trickle of Basque people to the Philippines. People from the Philippines trickled to XVI-XVII c. Acapulco too, before the Spanish banned enslaving Indians (and, by extension, Asians). Genetic studies of the Acapulco area still turn up snippets of DNA of Philippine ancestors.
I mean in the future – I only knew the name from that of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.
(That’s in a movie set some 500 years in the future, though it looks more like 50. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t intend to because, among other things, the premise is false; but references to it are everywhere. I do recommend the scene of his State of the Union address on YouTube.)
Nevada and California have plenty of Basques. You see lots of them, and their flag, if you go to a wool festival. (My wife and her friends used to be into carding, spinning, dyeing, weaving, that sort of thing, so I went to many wool festivals. I think we still may have a few fleeces for sale.)
It’s true that Basques are not the shepherds any more. Now they are the ones who own the sheep.
There’s something around these places called a “Basque restaurant”. That includes the one in Elko mentioned by Dmitry Pruss above. It’s not so much the cuisine as the presentation, which harks back to the way Basque shepherds used to be fed. You don’t get much choice, but you get served multiple courses, which are plonked in front of you one after another at a big communal table, with plenty of cheap red wine.
You may question what is so Basque about these restaurants. Years ago I used to visit the Basque Hotel in San Francisco, where you could stuff yourself with pretty decent food for not very much money. (Close to City Lights bookstore and the former Mabuhay Gardens punk venue.) Once there was some exotic music playing, so I asked the waitress “Is that Basque music?”. She said her father (the owner) and his friends were visiting, and they wanted to hear Basque music. So real Basques were behind it.
Back to the vexillological issue, I don’t think I’ve recently seen the Ikurinna in the wild, but for reasons unknown to me a house barely a block away from mine has recently taken to flying the Gwenn-ha-du,* associated with another West European ethnolinguistic group that currently finds itself without an actual sovereign nation-state of its own. That’s apparently not an “official” flag, so even a fairly generous reading of the Idaho statute (i.e. taking the reference to the Ikurinna as illustrative rather than exclusive and thus taking “country” to have a broader meaning than “sovereign nation-state”) probably does not authorize it to be flown by Idaho municipal governments.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Brittany
It’s not so much the cuisine as the presentation, which harks back to the way Basque shepherds used to be fed
yes, that’s what I remember and only now it begins to make sense, thank you
FWIW, my favorite (since 1984) American Basque restaurant (since 1898): The Martin Hotel in Winnemucca, Nevada, with menu and Basque surnames (Yrueta, Forgonnes, Bilboa, Uriguen) at the link.
That’s Basque?
Winnemucca as a toponym is not itself Basque but is from the name of an important local historical figure who was Paiute. Except he had the same name as his dad, who had been born Shoshone, and of course the internet is vague as to which of those Numic languages the supposed edifying meaning makes sense in. Winnemucca would seem to be in the middle of nowhere, but is situated on routes (both historical and current*) from somewhere to somewhere else, so you can read in the interesting (perhaps sometimes unintentionally comic) wiki article about its various famous visitors ranging from Butch Cassidy to Sun Yat-Sen.
*I have passed through Winnemucca by rail but did not take advantage of the chance to disembark, eat Basque food w/ copious amounts of wine, and then get the next train 24 hours later.
These places like Elko and Winnemucca are found along I-80 through Nevada, which follows the route of the first transcontinental railroad. The railroad basically followed the old emigrant trail, except that the emigrants had draft animals, so they had to veer north to find water sources. The railroad also needed water, but since the stations were permanent, they could drill wells. (In fact, one of the towns is called Wells.) All those towns were originally railroad towns.
The landscape is barren, with snow-capped mountains. Kind of scenic in an austere way. There’s a state prison around the halfway point. Nowadays it’s easy enough to zip through on the freeway. But when I go through there, I think of the emigrants who came all the way across the continent, finally to hit the Forty Mile Desert, a barren alkali wasteland between the Sinks of the Humboldt and the Truckee River (near modern Fernley). They used to water their animals all day, and try to make it across at night. Not everyone made it.
There’s a rest area on the freeway that has a historical marker, but few people stop there.
Winnemucca is a crossroads to Oregon and Idaho as well, and the present day watering spot in a sense of truck stops offering fuel and a snacks to the passerby. Stopped there countless times, and probably again this week. But I never visited Martin’s. Thank you for the recommendation!
When Geoff Mack rewrote his song “I’ve Been Everywhere” for Hank Snow, replacing the Australian place names with ones in the Americas, the first place mentioned was changed from Oodnadatta to Winnemucca.
By contrast when the Australian singer Nick Cave recorded a song full of toponyms originally recorded by Johnny Cash (and written for him by Bob Dylan) he did not feel the urge to swap in equivalent names of Australian places but stuck with the American originals, in an instance of what I guess the kids call cultural appropriation. https://genius.com/Nick-cave-and-the-bad-seeds-wanted-man-lyrics
From the Wikipedia article mentioned above:
The town was named for the 19th-century Chief Winnemucca of the local Northern Paiute tribe, who traditionally lived in this area. Winnemucca, translated, means “the giver.”
Somehow a Northern Paiute *wi-namaka, perhaps? (With wi-, instrumental prefix for radial motion, long objects, the wind, etc. + namaka ‘give food’.) I’m not even sure whether such a construction is grammatical. Alas, I have no time to pursue this question any further at the moment.
William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States, on the name:
In the online Northern Paiute dictionary, moko ‘shoe’.
There is also this here:
did not feel the urge to swap in equivalent names of Australian places but stuck with the American originals, in an instance of what I guess the kids call cultural appropriation.
Ok. I’ll keep my NZ-ised version of Route 66 to myself, then.
Helen S. Carlson, Nevada Place Names (here):
Like her, I don’t have confidence in any of these explanations.
My favorite Idaho placename is Owyhee (county and mountain), named in honor of two Hawaiian trappers out of Fort Astoria who died there, IIRC.
@Xérib
“Professor Phillip Earl, formerly with the Nevada Historical Society, wrote that the old chief’s son, Lee Winnemucca verified the one-shoe story in an interview he granted with a reporter in August 1887.”
I view this with a certain degree of skepticism. If my own father had been in the habit of telling whoppers to gullible individuals (or as a matter of general policy), it would be my duty to do my uttermost to protect his reputation.
Yeah, “verified” is not the right word there. I’d go with “supported” or “backed up” or “went along with.”
Welp, Liljeblad et al.’s 700+ page The Northern Paiute–Bannock Dictionary has
(The abbreviations signify that the source is Allen Snapp of Fort McDermitt, by way of Sven Liljeblad’s notes.)
Maybe after all it really is an impossible-but-true etymology, like Oll Korrect.
Well, I’ll be hornswoggled!
Anything is possible.
The Kusaasi toponym “Basyonde” has the perfectly transparent meaning “threw away bags.”
I’ve no idea how the name originated, and there doesn’t even seem to be a nice local aetiological story about it (unlike e.g. Sakoti, “warmed-up leftovers.”) A notorious fly-tipping incident?
For you anglophones divided by the same language: British English fly-tipping (see the previous comment) = American English illegal dumping.
“Eddyshaw’s Ophthalmology Clinic Masacree”
I somehow find a random/homely/jocular etymology like “one shoe” more plausible than a woo-woo/edifying one like “giver of spiritual gifts” (also suggested by the internet for “Winnemucca”). This isn’t quite an application of “lectio difficilior potior,” but seems somehow intuitively analogous.
I agree, and I’m glad to be able to tentatively accept this one.
‘Giver’, ‘Generous’, etc., as a name in general cannot be discounted out of hand, however. (Think Arabic Hisham هشام, etc.)
Liljeblad et al., Northern Paiute–Bannock Dictionary, also have the following entries:
The -ˀa is a form of the habitual agent noun suffix -ˀV, whose vowel copies the preceding vowel. From Maziar Toosarvandani (2010) ‘Patterns of Nominalization in Numic’, International Journal of American Linguistics vol. 76, no.1 (references omitted and abbreviations expanded; ɴᴏᴍ = nominalizer; ɪᴘ = instrumental prefix):
(The ipos in the gloss of Northern Paiute yapa-wɨnɨ-’ɨ is apparently the tuber of any of several species of Perideridia, which I had known before as yampa in English, from Shoshone; cf. the Northern Paiute yapa in the name.)
I presume this chief is Namagaˀa is Numaga, also known as Young Winnemucca.
I wonder if a NP *wi-namaga-ˀa (ɪᴘ.radially-give food-ɴᴏᴍ) would be grammatical.
If the name had a transparent and reasonable-sounding etymology, wouldn’t people fluent in the language pick it over a folk etymology? And then, the pronunciation /wannɨmoko/ fits better with the ‘one shoe’, /wan/ + /moko/ (epenthetic /ɨ/?) than with /*wi-namaga-ˀa/. On the other hand, why would the vowels and the stress change as they do from /ˈwannɨmoko/ to /wɪnəˈmʌkə/?
That doesn’t strike me as a problem — four-syllable words are unlikely to have initial stress in English, so moving it to the penultimate seems natural, and that would affect the vowels.