Why it was completely legal for Icelanders to kill Basque people on sight until 2015
Anna (Y12) explores the creation of Basque-Icelandic
Over the past 300,000 or so years that humans have existed, some interesting languages have emerged. The whistling language Silbo Gomero in La Gomera, the clicking language ǃXóõ in Botswana and the Amazon’s Pirahã, with no numbers or colours, are all strong contenders, but I think the most random and odd language that came to be is the Basque-Icelandic pidgin.
A pidgin is a language created between people that do not share a common language, so they use simplified terms from their language and mix it with the other. This was extremely common in colonised countries, as European colonisers would have to communicate to some extent with natives. Widely spoken examples of pidgins are Naijá (a mix of native Nigerian languages, English and French) with 30 million speakers and Haitian Creole (a mix of French and West African languages).
Basque, found in northern Spain and southern France, and Icelandic are languages individually loved by linguists for their history and uniqueness, but they are loved even more together. For Basque and Icelandic, two languages relatively contained in their countries of origin and distant from each other, mixing sounded like an extremely unlikely scenario, yet the two languages did interact.
But how did this even happen? It all began due to the growth in commercial whaling, in which the Basque people were one of the first groups to participate. They spread so far north from their region that they reached the remote Westfjords of Iceland in the 1600s.
Spaniards and Icelanders had a mutual agreement where both parties benefited: Basques paid taxes and traded with them. During this process, a pidgin developed to ease communication.
Proof of this can be found in numerous glossaries and manuscripts, which served as dictionaries and translators. Most notably were the absurd number of profanities covered, perhaps demonstrating the tensions arising between the groups.
Things took a gory turn after a tragic shipwreck in 1615, where Basque sailors were forced to beach in the town Vatneyri. They stole dried fish and other meals, an inexcusable crime in the long, harsh winter. 14 out of the 80 Basques were slaughtered in their sleep by the enraged vikings who inhabited the area. A series of revenge acts began between the two groups, and the event was known as the Slaying of the Spaniards, or the Spánverjavígin. This was probably a good time to use the phrase ‘For ju mala gissuna’, meaning ‘you are a bad man’ in Basque-Icelandic.
After this event, the Westfjords government passed a law stating that any Icelander could kill a Basque on sight.
Four centuries later, Jónas Guðmundsson, Westfjords district commissioner, removed the law in 2015 for obvious reasons. He states that ‘The decision to do away with the decree was more symbolic than anything else, we have laws, of course, and killing anyone– including Basques – is forbidden these days’.
Despite their rocky relationship, it’s safe to say that Basques are free to see the gorgeous fjords of Northwest Iceland without having to hide in fear of the death penalty for a 400-year-old crime.
If you’re curious, here are links to Icelandic and Basque being spoken! You’ll notice they’re very different.