Eli5 where is Basque from
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The Basque language has no known related languages. Nobody knows where it came from and we probably will never know for sure.
It is most likely that its origins are a language spoken in that area before people speaking early Indo-European languages moved to Europe and whose languages became all the other languages spoken in Europe (apart from Finnish which has a different origin).
Basque seems to be from the [Aquitanian language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquitanian_language) (or languages) spoken in roughly the same area. Aquitanian seems to have evolved into Basque, similar to how Latin evolved into Spanish, French, Italian, etc.
Where Aquitanian is from is anyone’s guess. It is thought to be Pre-Indo-European, meaning that its own ancestors, the languages that it came from, were probably already present in Europe long before languages such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Old Slavonic, or Old Irish were ever spoken in Europe.
Ultimately, all languages come from the human mind. We’ve actually watched the birth of a language once, in the case of [Nicaraguan Sign Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language#When_it_became_language). Basically, human languages get born whenever groups of humans meet and need a common method of communication. The grammar of a forming language starts out simple, but gets more and more elaborate as each new generation learns it. New child learners change the language over time by observing its patterns, and copying them into new contexts, while also recombining existing structures in new ways.
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