There is no standard pronunciation, but regional variation is not very significant, and all dialects are mutually intelligible.

Vowels
Basque has five vowels /i e a o u/ and five diphthongs /ai ei oi ui au eu/. The Souletin dialect spoken in France has an additional front rounded vowel /ü/ and a contrasting set of five nasalized vowels.

Consonants

Basque makes a distinction between apical (*) and laminar (**) articulation for its alveolar fricatives and affricates. In apical articulation, the tip (apex) of the tongue comes in contact with the alveolar ridge, while in laminar articulation, it is the blade of the tongue that comes in contact.

The pronunciation of the sound /j/ varies widely and is therefore not included in the table above.

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Basque is an agglutinating language, i.e., it adds suffixes to roots to create new words and to represent grammatical functions. Prefixes are relatively uncommon.

Noun phrase
Basque nouns are marked for definiteness/indefiniteness. Most noun phrases contain a determiner. There are four definite determiners: three demonstratives and a definite article in the form of a suffix. They are marked for number (singular or plural). All the other determiners are indefinite and are not marked for number. There is no gender marking.

Buber gives the following example using the word etxe "house" to illustrate how the Basque noun phrase works.

Basque has over a dozen cases represented by suffixes.

Modifiers precede nouns they modify.

Pronouns and demonstratives
Basque personal pronouns are shown below:

There are three demonstratives, just like in Spanish.

Verb phrase
Verb morphology is quite complex, and only some of its features will be mentioned below.

• Basque is an ergative-absolutive language. In ergative-absolutive languages, the absolutive is the grammatical case used to mark both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb. It contrasts with the ergative case, which marks the subject of transitive verbs. For example, the noun mutil "boy" takes the absolutive singular ending -a both as subject of the intransitive clause Mutila etorri da "the boy came" and as object of the transitive clause in Irakasleak mutila ikusi du "the teacher saw the boy," in which the subject is marked with the ergative ending -ak.
  
• Most Basque verbs use auxiliaries, just like English. Finite verbs generally agree in person and number with their subjects, and their direct and indirect objects (if any). Agreement is usually ergative, i.e., prefixes are used for absolutives, and suffixes are used for ergatives. Certain past-tense forms have ergatives marked by prefixes. Indirect objects are marked by suffixes.
  
• Intransitive verbs are conjugated with the auxiliary verb izan "be," which also functions as an independent verb. Transitive verbs are conjugated with the auxiliary edun "have."
  
• Besides the indicative mood, Basque verbs also have various imperative, subjunctive, potential, conditional and irrealis (contrary to fact) forms.

Word order
The basic word order in Basque is Subject-Object-Verb, with some variation is allowed.

As a result of close contact with Latin and Iberian languages for over 2,000 years, Basque has borrowed many words from them, e.g., libiru "book," boitura "car," kantu "song." However, most of the basic vocabulary is inherently Basque, as you can see from the list below: