Dear colleagues
We know that this kind of message is not common in this website, but we would like to inform you about a direct attack to the Basque culture, which has a direct influence in our research efforts.
The only Basque language newspaper in the world "Egunkaria" was temporarily closed on February the 20th and 10 top representatives of Basque culture arrested by a Spanish judge, under allegations of collaboration with terrorists. We want to stress that there has not been any trial yet; they have been held in protective custody. Before even finding the newspaper employees guilty, the judge decided to close down the newspaper. The closing of the newspaper is a preventive temporary measure, but Spanish law allows the closing to go on for five years. Even after a few weeks the newspaper becomes financially unfeasible.
It s worth mentioning that Egunkaria has the support of different political sensibilities in the Basque Society, and it is also well known in the International Community. The vast majority of Basque society does not agree with the closing of Egunkaria (list of supporters in ttp://www.euskalnet.net/ileturia/egunkaria/list.htm). The International Federation of Journalists (http://www.ifex.org/alerts/view.html?id=11985), Reporters Without Borders (http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=4998) and the president of the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages, among others, have also criticized the measure.
Being Basque an endangered language (around 500.000 speakers) under a normalization process, currently available corpora are small in size, and one of the most promising sources for our research efforts was Egunkaria. There is also an English version of it that would allow us to research on parallel corpora. One of the biggest linguistic corpora available for Basque is the compilation of the daily issues since 2000. Language technology was being used to search in their online news database (unfortunately, their internet edition was also closed). A document classification research project was underway.
We do not want to initiate a debate. If you want more information or to express your sympathy, please refer to http://www.sustatu.com/english/egunkaria.
Today Basque is "an even more" endangered language.