Basque is natively spoken by about 800,000 people in the Basque Country, a region spanning parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. It is unique as a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language, and is a key part of Basque cultural identity, which includes a strong tradition of dance, music, and festivals. Basque grammar is characterized by an ergative-absolutive structure, a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, and extensive use of suffixes to indicate grammatical relationships.