English has become the main lingua franca for scientific dissemination. Its hegemony contrasts with the scarce presence of minority languages such as Basque in academic publications. Its presence, in addition to having a short trajectory, has not yet been studied. This paper aims to identify the reasons for publishing or not publishing in the Basque language. We carried out a study of the opinions of 301 researchers in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. The opinions were analysed through a lexical analysis using the Reinert method. The results revealed that the reasons for not publishing in Basque were the ease of publishing in English or Spanish in contrast to the difficulty of publishing in Basque, the limited impact of journals in Basque, and the fact that the scientific community does not accord these journals sufficient value or recognition. However, the participants' reasons for publishing were a desire to create content for the Basque scientific community and a rootedness in the Basque identity itself. The results are of interest in the context of advancing the normalisation of the Basque language in the academic field.