The PuntuEUS Foundation stresses the need for strategies to impact on the situation of the Basque-language Internet

  • Basque use across the Internet has remained steady over the last 3 years
  •  Irontec has produced a .EUS map
  •  .EUS domain growth is taking place above all in companies

The PuntuEUS Observatory has for the third year running analysed the presence of Basque across the Internet.  The Observatory measures three areas: the situation of the .EUS domain, the Internet in the Basque Country, and the situation of Basque across the Internet.

The PuntuEUS Observatory is an initiative of the PuntuEUS Foundation and measures the situation of Basque across the Internet; the results can be accessed on the website. The analysis is conducted once a year, and at a press conference held in Bilbao the results of the measurements made using data for 2017 were presented by Lorea Bilbao, the Head of Basque Language and Culture at the Chartered Provincial Council of Bizkaia, and Josu Waliño, the CEO of the PuntuEUS Foundation.

Waliño stressed that according to the measurements made by the Observatory over the last three years, there had been little change in the data pertaining to the Internet in the Basque Country.  The fact that similar results have emerged over the last three years indicates that medium- to long-term policies are needed to change language habits on the Internet and that the snapshot does not change from one day to the next.

When all the Basque Country’s websites are taken into consideration, 26,663 of them have content in Basque, accounting for 16% of the total. This figure is more precise than in the measurements made in previous years thanks to improvements developed in the crawler (measuring system) that conducts the research.

When the focus is placed on the websites using the .EUS domain, Basque use is an entirely different story. 90% of the .EUS domain websites in fact use Basque.

Among the websites that use .EUS, mostly Basque (90%) and Spanish (83%) are used. They would be followed by English (47%) and French with a very small presence (12%), and other languages (11%).

Basque and Spanish are very much on a par in this distribution and that is, to a certain extent, understandable, because most of the websites are multilingual ones and many of them are located in the Peninsular Basque Country.

.EUS domain growth is taking place above all in companies. Right now, nearly half of the .EUS domains are owned by companies, 43% in fact, which is nine points higher than last year.

In terms of geographical distribution, although Gipuzkoa has been the strongest one historically, in recent years the .EUS community has been growing at a faster rate in Bizkaia.

The .EUS domain grew 22% last year and right now 8,100 domain names are registered.

.EUS map

The PuntuEUS Observatory aims to provide a tool needed when it comes to specifying the strategy and policies necessary to reinforce the presence that Basque has on the Internet. It is an open tool and is available to the whole of Basque society to use as it wishes.

The Irontec R&D company did in fact use the PuntuEUS Observatory to develop the ‘.EUS map’ project .The project developed by Irontec has received funding from the Chartered Provincial Council of Bizkaia.