diff --git a/src/transformers/tokenization_bert.py b/src/transformers/tokenization_bert.py
index ac14370a18..cefb917798 100644
--- a/src/transformers/tokenization_bert.py
+++ b/src/transformers/tokenization_bert.py
@@ -341,7 +341,7 @@ class BasicTokenizer(object):
             if self.do_lower_case and token not in never_split:
                 token = token.lower()
                 token = self._run_strip_accents(token)
-            split_tokens.extend(self._run_split_on_punc(token))
+            split_tokens.extend(self._run_split_on_punc(token, never_split))
 
         output_tokens = whitespace_tokenize(" ".join(split_tokens))
         return output_tokens
diff --git a/tests/test_tokenization_bert.py b/tests/test_tokenization_bert.py
index 793bb8fa54..49bb073351 100644
--- a/tests/test_tokenization_bert.py
+++ b/tests/test_tokenization_bert.py
@@ -119,6 +119,13 @@ class BertTokenizationTest(TokenizerTesterMixin, unittest.TestCase):
             tokenizer.tokenize(" \tHeLLo!how  \n Are yoU?  "), ["HeLLo", "!", "how", "Are", "yoU", "?"]
         )
 
+    def test_basic_tokenizer_respects_never_split_tokens(self):
+        tokenizer = BasicTokenizer(do_lower_case=False, never_split=["[UNK]"])
+
+        self.assertListEqual(
+            tokenizer.tokenize(" \tHeLLo!how  \n Are yoU? [UNK]"), ["HeLLo", "!", "how", "Are", "yoU", "?", "[UNK]"]
+        )
+
     def test_wordpiece_tokenizer(self):
         vocab_tokens = ["[UNK]", "[CLS]", "[SEP]", "want", "##want", "##ed", "wa", "un", "runn", "##ing"]