Basque Cuisine and the French Connection

In preparation for our planned sampling of Basque cuisine, I thought I'd check up on Kim's connection with the le pay Basque.  It's not as close as I had imagined, but I did find some very interesting historical stuff.

Kim's great great grandparents emigrated from Doazon, in southern France (near Pau).  (Great) Uncle Arthur has actually been there.  That puts it in the historical area called Béarn, which forms part of the modern-day département of Pyrénées-Atlantiques (64).  The southernmost part of this department is made up (historically) of three areas of what was formerly the Basque country.  Other names for this part of the world are Gascony and the modern day région (and historical area) of Aquitaine (like the Boston restaurant) [the region includes four other departments in addition to #64].  We also (but only indirectly) get Bearnaise sauce from this area.

To be precise, there are three arondissements in the department 64.  One (Pau) where Doazon is located is entirely Bearnese: the language they speak there (other than French) is Bearnese, a dialect of Occitan. The other two arondissements are either totally or partially Basque-speaking.  So, it turns out that Kim's French ancestry is Bearnese, not Basque (I think it was I that first suggested the Basque possibility).  Here's a good historical map of the region.


While researching this, I discovered a good web site that details the languages of the world: Ethnologue.  My only complaint with this web site is that it doesn't seem to give examples of the language so it's hard to get a quick idea of how closely related to its linguistic neighbors it might be.

One particularly interesting historical fact of which I was sadly unaware is that the existing Swedish Royal family (the house of Bernadotte), is descended from Napoleon's general, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte who became King Karl XIV Johan of Sweden (he was also King of Norway, but that line didn't continue to rule Norway).