Basque or Escuara.
A language spoken in the Spanish provinces, Guipuzcoa and Biscay, partially in Alava and Navarre; in France, only in the arrondissements of Mauléon and Bayonne in the department of the Lower Pyrenees. Five principal dialects, with several sub-dialects:—Guipuzcoan, Biscayan (and the dialect of Llodia) in Spain; and the Bas-Navarrais, Souletin and Labourdin, in France. Clearly agglutinative. Analogies detected with the Finnish, by Prince L. L. Buonaparte and others; and N. American (Algonkin) by Pruner-Bey and Charency; also with the Khamitic by D’Abbadie, and Accadian by Sayce. Fabre’s “Dict. Français-Basque,” Bayonne, 1870, “Essai de Grammaire,” par W. J. Van Eys, Amsterdam, 1867. W. W. See [Escuara].
Basundo.
A native dialect of Africa, belonging to the N.W. division of the Kaffir group, vernacular in the R. Gaboon.
Batak, or Batta.
A native dialect of wild Malays in Sumatra; it is allied to Bugis, with written characters imitated from the Devanagiri alphabet of Sanskrit.
⁂ The Orang Batta are the indigines of Sumatra; Banjak, Pakpak, Zingkal, Toba, are all sub-dialects of Batta in Sumatra. See Van der Tunk’s “Collection of Battak Texts, with Notes and Translations,” 4 vols., Amsterdam, 1860-62; “Bataksch Leesboek”; and “Bataksch-Nederduitsch Woordenboek,” Amsterdam, 1861. ☞
Batar, see [Bor].
Batavian-Malay.