Baby names · Basque origin

A language with no known relatives

Euskara is a language isolate — spoken in the western Pyrenees before Indo-European reached Europe and related to nothing else alive. Its names are correspondingly unlike their Spanish and French neighbours: Xabier, from etxeberri, the new house, gave the world Xavier. Others draw on landscape and Marian devotion, Nerea, Ainhoa, Iker. The x is a sh sound, which is the one thing outsiders reliably get wrong.

7 Basque names in our library · 2 girl, 5 boy