Thanks to laozi, we now have complete trilogy dubs for Basque, and will soon have incomplete dubs for Galician. Both of these are OTA recordings of TV broadcasts.

It seems incomplete dubs (dubs with a few chunks missing here and there) are likely to become more common as we rely on sources like this, losing audio due to aging videotapes, badly-placed commercials, hitting the record button too late, and so on. On the plus side, Project Threepio will have subtitles for all of the missing Galician dialogue in the partial dubs (but, sadly, no complete-film subtitles), so we’ll effectively have a complete translation of the trilogy into Galician.

As a linguistics nerd, I’ve always been interested in Basque. What does it sound like? Now that I’ve heard a lot of it, to me it sounds like a Spanish person speaking nonsense words. Most of the sounds and inflections seem very much Spanish, but the words? Aside from a few loanwords, no similarity at all to Spanish or anything else. And the written language is like nothing else I’ve seen, again aside from a few loanwords. All in all, it’s pretty cool.