by Sidney Schroepfer Sidney Schroepfer is a senior in psychology and Spanish at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sidney’s future plans include applying to graduate school for clinical psychology and volunteering in ESL classrooms. He wrote this blog post in 418 ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ in Fall 2021. Before beginning this blog post, I would like to thank my host parent, Tere, and the professors from the University of Deusto. Thanks to them, my study abroad experience had a major impact in understanding myself and the world around me, and I gained a deep connection to the city, its languages, and its people. In this blog I interweave my observations from a typical metro commute with research that demonstrates where and how Euskara is used. And therefore, demonstrates how a salient Basque identity is being shaped. First, I paint Bilbao’s context through a brief history lesson. The Basque language, Euskara, is a language isolate (Urban, 2021). It has no perc...