[1] Basque whale hunters who sailed to the Icelandic Westfjords used the pidgin as a means of rudimentary communication with locals.

Basque whalers were among the first to catch whales commercially; they spread to the far parts of the North Atlantic and even reached Brazil.

Uhlenbeck had expertise in Basque, but since he retired from the university in 1926, he gave the glossaries to his post-graduate student Nicolaas Gerard Hendrik Deen.

It was titled Glossaria duo vasco-islandica and written in Latin, though most of the phrases of the glossaries were also translated into German and Spanish.

In a letter, the Icelandic linguist Sveinbjörn Egilsson mentioned a document with two pages containing "funny words and glosses"[a][11] and he copied eleven examples of them.

[14] Only two of the pages contain Basque–Icelandic glossary; the material surrounding includes unrelated items such as instructions about magic and casting love spells.

For example, pidgin berrua usnia ('warm milk-DET') versus Basque esne beroa ('milk warm-DET').

That would explain for example why the Icelandic ja 'yes' is translated with both Basque bai and French vÿ (modern spelling oui) at the end of Vocabula Biscaica.