<Eibartarrak>

• Eibartarrak are the naturals of Eibar, a city in the Basque Country. Population 30.000, half of them Basque-speakers. A variety of the Bizkaian dialect of Basque is spoken in Eibar.
• Some Eibartarrak founded a mailing list in April 1998, to discuss and talk online about issues regarding our city.
• Discussion is open to anybody, be he or she from Eibar or not, but the language of the forum is Basque, only Basque.
• But, isn't that discrimination?
  • This is a measure of positive action, as Basque is an endangered minority language, always overwhelmed by the demographic and institutional position of the most powerful language, Spanish in this case. Even in allegedly equal bilingual Internet forums, Basque fails to reach a presence according to its already diminished presence in society: discussion tends to be monopolized by the majority language.
  • When you speak in a given language, those who don't speak it, don't understand what you say. That's not discrimination. It's the logic consequence of human diversity. Slovenes tend to speak in Slovenian, obviously: if you don't speak Slovenian, and happen to hear them, you are not discriminated by the choice of Slovene people to speak their language...
• As for April 1999, first year of functioning, we are 51 subscribers, and we have exchanged 450 messages in the whole year. There are Eibartarrak posting from Mexico, Switzerland, Eibar itself (of course) and several Basque cities, among other places.
• The mailing list is hosted free by the service of eGroups.com, and we have an open archive here: http://www.egroups.com/group/eibartarrak/ . Eibartarrak has been the first local mailing list opened in the Basque Country. It has been also the first Basque-language forum hosted by any free mailing-list commercial service of Internet.
• We have created this Home Page to put here some materials refering to the functioning of the list, and other files and documents related to Eibar, our hometown. It is located here, at <http://geocities.datacellar.net/Paris/Cafe/5812> and can be reached through <http://surf.to/eibar>.
• Here, we have documents that are written in Basque, but there are some that can be still be useful for the foreigner:
  • A vocabulary of the local arms industry (a local handcraft tradition that dates back to the 17th century). Local dialect forms and Spanish equivalents are given.
  • A vocabulary of industrial terms. Standard Basque and Spanish forms.
  • A vocabulary of bird names. Local dialect forms, Latin scientific name, and Spanish name are given.
  • Traditional sayings and modisms from Eibar (only in Basque).
  • Artworks from Ignacio Zuloaga, a local painter.
• You can check also the 'links' section with Web pages related to Eibar.

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Wanna know more about the Basques? Here you have some links.

Basque Country: General stuff. Buber's Basque Page. English-language Internet guide to Basque resources. http://students.washington.edu/buber/Basque/ Eusnet / Jalgi. Basque Internet Service Providers http://www.eusnet.org / http://www.jalgi.com Euskal Herria Journal. An independentist site. http://www.freespeech.org/ehj Elkarri. This group promotes dialogue for a peaceful settlement of the Basque conflict. http://www.encomix.es/~elkarrit Basque Red Net (Euskal Sare Gorria): http://www.basque-red.net Eugenio Alberdi´s page (great!) http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~eugenio/basque.html Basque Autonomous Govt. site (for 3 provinces only): http://www.euskadi.net Kaixo. Basque search engine. http://www.kaixo.com GeoNative: a Basque/English bilingual site devoted to other language minorities and their placenames. http://geocities.datacellar.net/Athens/9479 http://geocities.datacellar.net/Athens/9479/basque.html "Readings on Basque Language, Culture, Politics and Identity" : academic papers translated into English. http://txoko.econ.surrey.ac.uk/brindex.htm Basque Country: Linguistic stuff Online dictionary: Euskalterm terminology database by UZEI. Interface in Basque but easy to use. English, French, Basque and Spanish covered. http://www.uzei.com/scripts/uzei/Euskalterm.cfm Basque online speech database. Hear the sound of spoken Basque (the Bakio variety of Bizkaian dialect), and know (and hear) the phonemes of Basque, courtesy of Aholab. http://bips.bi.ehu.es/bakio http://bips.bi.ehu.es/basque EIZIE: The association of Basque translators and interpreters: http://www.eizie.org Basque computational linguistics group (Ixa), and one of their works, the Basque online spell checker, Euspell. http://ixa.si.ehu.es http://ixa.si.ehu.es/tresnak/euspell.html Larry Trask's Basque site. Trask, a linguist, has developed an interesting site for foreigners who wish to know more about the Basque language. A linguistic sketch, cultural vocabulary and a Basque FAQ are there. http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/larryt/ Linguistic facts, seriously and plainly explained by another linguist: Manfred Ostrowski. http://osis.ucsd.edu/~ehj/html/mowstr.html