This video is clearly not meant for Basque people, but for Spaniardas that don't know Euskara. It's just an example of how Spanish fascists spread Basquephobia.
The members of Bildu celebrated their elections results with the expression "Jo ta ke". But do you know what it really means? Jotakes are grenades designed and developed by terrorist band ETA in the years 1987-88. They were used in attacks like the one against the headquarter houses of Zarautz on Aug 7th 1987. They were also used in the attack against the headquarter houses of Mungia on March 23rd 1991. In fact, ETA former leader Txapote used this same expression during a trial at the National Audience. This expression was popularized by ETA-supporting band Su Ta Gar and that's why now it's used in different contexts meaning "hit it hard until victory". What do you think about Bildu now using this saying?
[x]
Jo ta ke means, literally, hit and smoke. It's believed it comes from what was said at the iron factories: hit (the iron) and then burn, hit (the iron) and the burn, all the time until the work was done. With time, it became a synonym of tirelessly. So the super usual saying in political or sport contexts Jo ta ke irabazi arte! just means Tirelessly or non-stop until victory.
It existed long before Su Ta Gar's song ffs.
The grenades were called jotakes because of this same meaning: we keep going towards victory non-stop, as the weapons were means for ETA to achieve their goals.
Jo ta ke - and Basque language in general - isn't something that was born for ETA or ETA-supporting environments as these fascists like to make people believe, once and again. They're indeed jo ta ke until more and more people hate Basques. Luckily, many know better but still this is plain misinformation and blatant Basquephobia.
They're just bitter EH Bildu had an incredible result at the Basque elections and because ~70% of Basque votes were for Basque nationalist parties.
Sweden saying they'll vote against allowing the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Union Parliament because "there's lots of minority languages and we can't allow them all" is so funny because CATALAN HAS MORE SPEAKERS THAN SWEDISH
Catalan is the 13th most spoken language in the EU. It has more than 10 million speakers, which means it has more speakers than other languages that are already official EU languages like Maltese (530,000), Estonian (1.2 million), Latvian (1.5 million), Irish (1.6 million), Slovene (2.5 million), Lithuanian (3 million), Slovak (5 million), Finnish (5.8 million), Danish (6 million), Swedish (10 million), and Bulgarian (10 million).
Neither Galician (3 million) nor Basque (750,000) would still be the least spoken languages to be allowed in the EU representative bodies.
But even if any of them did, so what? Why do speakers of smaller languages deserve less rights than those of bigger languages? How are we supposed to feel represented by the EU Parliament when our representatives aren't even allowed to speak our language, but the dominant groups can speak theirs?
It all comes down to the hatred of language/cultural diversity and the belief that it's an inconvenience, that only the languages of independent countries have any kind of value while the rest should be killed off. After all, isn't that what Sweden has been trying to do to the indigenous Sami people for centuries?
Some good news that should be the minimum, but hey this is France:
The Brevet des collèges (national exam taken at the end of middle school) will be available in Basque and Breton, though supporting documents will still be in French from what I gather. This was the status quo until last November when the Éducation Nationale attempted to forbid it. That this is not enshrined in law in 2024 and still largely depends on students' parents mobilisation and that of some députés is mind-boggling, but that is the norm for many minority languages in Europe.
Co-official and non-official languages of the Spanish state.
I was, what? WTF is that little island of Basque language in Segovia??
And I was today years old when I learnt about gacería or briquero, a language spoken by ~500 people as a first language, and ~5000 passive speakers (they can understand it but can't speak it).
Gacería was born around the 12th-13th centuries among cattle merchants as a code language for their businesses, and though it follows the Spanish pronunciation and grammar, it has influences of literally everyone in the Iberian peninsula at that time:
- Old Spanish
- French
- Arabic
- Caló (Iberian Roma people's language)
- Galician and Basque, due to Galician and Navarrese people leaving their homelands to repopulate the area after the Reconquista.
Some examples of Basque words in gacería:
artón = arto = bread
gazo = gaizto = bad
motillón = mutil, motel = young man
muy = mihi = tongue
ura = ura = water
urdaya = urdaia = pork, meat