Is Basque related to the African language Dogon?
Today is International Day of the Basque Language, which we celebrate at Lingoblog with an article by Peter Bakker.
One person in Spain has claimed that Basque is related with the Dogon language spoken in Mali in Africa. Does that claim make sense? It sounds unlikely, but it is important not to reject the idea without checking the evidence.
Background information:
Languages are classified into language families. The languages of a family have been proven to be related, i.e. scholars are certain that these languages descend from the same ancestor language, which was perhaps spoken many millennia ago. Some families are as small as one language, for instance Basque. A language like Basque is therefore strictly speaking not a family, … ↪