Basque is the only surviving Paleo-European language spoken in Europe, predating the arrival of speakers of the Indo-European languages that dominate the continent today. Basque is spoken by the Basques and other residents of the Basque Country, a region that straddles the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. Basque is classified as a language isolate, with no relationship to any other language having been established. The Basques are indigenous to and primarily inhabit the Basque Country. The Basque language is spoken by 806,000 Basques in all territories. Of these, 93.7% (756,000) are in the Spanish area of the Basque Country and the remaining 6.3% (50,000) are in the French portion.
The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called West Caucasian, Abkhazo-Adyghean, Abkhazo-Circassian, Circassic, or sometimes Pontic languages, is a family of languages spoken in the northwestern Caucasus region, chiefly in three Russian republics, the disputed territory of Abkhazia, Georgia, and Turkey, with smaller communities scattered throughout the Middle East.
The Vascones were a pre-Roman tribe who, on the arrival of the Romans in the 1st century, inhabited a territory that spanned between the upper course of the Ebro river and the southern basin of the western Pyrenees, a region that coincides with present-day Navarre, western Aragon and northeastern La Rioja, in the Iberian Peninsula. The Vascones are often considered ancestors of the present-day Basques to whom they left their name.
The Iberian language was the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era. An ancient Iberian culture can be identified as existing between the 7th and 1st centuries BC, at least.
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non-pulmonic stops, *pʼ *tʼ *kʼ, instead of the plain voiced ones, *b *d *ɡ as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
Dené–Caucasian is a discredited language family proposal that includes widely-separated language groups spoken in the Northern Hemisphere: Sino-Tibetan languages, Yeniseian languages, Burushaski and North Caucasian languages in Asia; Na-Dené languages in North America; and the Vasconic languages from Europe.
The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain the purportedly distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European languages. Based on the elements of Common Germanic vocabulary and syntax which do not seem to have cognates in other Indo-European languages, it claims that Proto-Germanic may have been either a creole or a contact language that subsumed a non-Indo-European substrate language, or a hybrid of two quite different Indo-European languages, mixing the centum and satem types. Which culture or cultures may have contributed the substrate material is an ongoing subject of academic debate and study.
The Aquitanian language was the language of the ancient Aquitani, spoken on both sides of the western Pyrenees in ancient Aquitaine and in the areas south of the Pyrenees in the valleys of the Basque Country before the Roman conquest. It probably survived in Aquitania north of the Pyrenees until the Early Middle Ages.
Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld is a German historical linguist known for his controversial theories of a "Vasconic" and an "Atlantic" stratum in European languages, published since the 1990s.
The origin of the Basques and the Basque language is a controversial topic that has given rise to numerous hypotheses. Modern Basque, a descendant or close relative of Aquitanian and Proto-Basque, is the only pre-Indo-European language that is extant in western Europe. The Basques have therefore long been supposed to be a remnant of a pre-Indo-European population of Europe.
Old European is the term used by Hans Krahe (1964) for the language of the oldest reconstructed stratum of European hydronymy in Central and Western Europe.
The Atlantic languages of Semitic or "Semitidic" (para-Semitic) origin are a disputed concept in historical linguistics put forward by Theo Vennemann. He proposed that Semitic-language-speakers occupied regions in Europe thousands of years ago and influenced the later European languages that are not part of the Semitic family. The theory has found no notable acceptance among linguists or other relevant scholars and is criticised as being based on sparse and often-misinterpreted data.
The Vasconic substrate hypothesis is a proposal that several Western European languages contain remnants of an old language family of Vasconic languages, of which Basque is the only surviving member. The proposal was made by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, but has been rejected by other linguists.
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method.
The paleo-Hispanic languages are the languages of the Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula, excluding languages of foreign colonies, such as Greek in Emporion and Phoenician in Qart Hadast. After the Roman conquest of Hispania the Paleohispanic languages, with the exception of Proto-Basque, were replaced by Latin, the ancestor of the modern Iberian Romance languages.
Late Basquisation is a minority hypothesis that dates the arrival of the first speakers of the Basque language in northeastern Iberia from Aquitaine to the 5th or 6th century AD – as opposed to the mainstream view of it being the last remaining descendant of one of the pre-Indo-European languages of Prehistoric Europe.
The pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages, not necessarily related to one another, that existed in Prehistoric Europe, Asia Minor, Ancient Iran and Southern Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts are Hittite and date from the 19th century BC in Kültepe, and while estimates vary widely, the spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at the latest by the 3rd millennium BC. Thus, the pre-Indo-European languages must have developed earlier than or, in some cases, alongside the Indo-European languages that ultimately displaced almost all of them.
Proto-Basque, or Pre-Basque, is the reconstructed predecessor of the Basque language before the Roman conquests in the Western Pyrenees. A small sample of what is thought to be a form of Proto-Basque has been discovered on the Hand of Irulegi, an inscribed bronze artifact in the shape of a right hand dated to the 1st century BCE.
John T. Koch is an American academic, historian, and linguist who specializes in Celtic studies, especially prehistory, and the early Middle Ages. He is the editor of the five-volume Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. He is perhaps best known as the leading proponent of the Celtic from the West hypothesis.
The Paleo-European languages, or Old European languages, are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families caused by the Bronze Age invasion from the Eurasian steppe of pastoralists whose descendant languages dominate the continent today. Today, the vast majority of European populations speak Indo-European languages, but until the Bronze Age, it was the opposite, with Paleo-European languages of non-Indo-European affiliation dominating the linguistic landscape of Europe.
