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Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories. Of these, 614,000 live in the Spanish part of the Basque country and the remaining 51,800 live in the French part.

In academic discussions of the distribution of Basque in Spain and France, it is customary to refer to three ancient provinces in France and four Spanish provinces. Native speakers are concentrated in a contiguous area including parts of the Spanish Autonomous Communities of the Basque Autonomous Community (Spanish: País Vasco; Euskara: Euskadi) and Navarre and in the western half of the French Département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

These provinces and many areas of Navarre are heavily populated by ethnic Basques, but the Euskara language had, at least until the 1990s, all but disappeared from most of Álava, western parts of Biscay and central and southern areas of Navarre. In southwestern France, the ancient Basque-populated provinces were Labourd, Lower Navarre, and Soule.

A standardized form of the Basque language, called Batua, was developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s. Batua is mainly used in the Spanish Basque Country. In France the Basque language school Seaska and the association for a bilingual schooling Ikasbi meet a wide range of Basque language educational needs up to the Sixth Form.

Apart from this standardized version, there are six main Basque dialects, corresponding to the above mentioned historic provinces populated by Basques: Bizkaian, Gipuzkoan, and Upper Navarrese in Spain and Lower Navarrese, Lapurdian, and Zuberoan (in France). However, the dialect boundaries are not congruent with political boundaries.

Though geographically surrounded by Indo-European Romance languages, Basque is classified as a language isolate. It is the last remaining pre-Indo-European language in Western Europe. Consequently, its prehistory may not be reconstructible by means of the comparative method except by applying it to differences between dialects within the language. Little is known of its origins but it is likely that an early form of the Basque language was present in Western Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages to the area.