The Potential Influence of the Basque Language on the Formation of Specific Lexico-Grammatical Phenomena in French

There are a number of phenomena in the French language which are not derived from the system of Latin, which served as the basis for the formation of French. The formation of compound tenses, the development in these tenses of two auxiliary verbs, avoir and être, the formation of the future simple, the twenty-digit counting system and a number of other features which appeared in the Gallo-Romanic period, indicate that this is the result of the influence of languages which were widespread in this area before Latin. Traditionally, some of these phenomena were associated with the Gallic substrate, but in this case one cannot deny the influence of the older, autochthonous languages, in particular, the Basque language.