| Continental Celtic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Continental Europe, Anatolia |
| Linguistic classification | Indo-European
|
| Subdivisions | |
| Language codes | |
| Glottolog | None |
 Celtic languages during the Iron Age and classical Antiquity. 1: early Iron Age core region (Hallstatt -H-, early La Tène -L-) 2: assumed Celtic expansion by the 4th century BC L: La Tène site H: Hallstatt site I: Iberia B: British Isles G: Galatia, settled in the 3rd century BC (after 279 BC) | |
TheContinental Celtic languages are the now-extinct group of theCeltic languages that were spoken on the continent of Europe and in centralAnatolia, as distinguished from theInsular Celtic languages of theBritish Isles,Ireland andBrittany.Continental Celtic is a geographic, rather than linguistic, grouping of the ancient Celtic languages.
These languages were spoken by the people known to Roman and Greek writers as theKeltoi,Celtae,Galli, andGalatae.[citation needed] They were spoken in an area arcing from the northern half ofIberia in the west to north ofBelgium, and east to theCarpathian basin and theBalkans asNoric, and in inner Anatolia (modern day Turkey) asGalatian.
Even thoughBreton has been spoken inContinental Europe since at least the 6th century AD, it is not considered one of the Continental Celtic languages, as it is aBrittonic language, likeCornish andWelsh. A Gaulish substratum in Breton has been suggested, but that is debated.
It is likely thatCelts spoke dozens of different languages anddialects across Europe in pre-Roman times, but only a small number areattested:
The modern termContinental Celtic is used in contrast toInsular Celtic. However, while many researchers agree with theInsular Celtic hypothesis that the Insular Celtic languages constitute a linguistically distinct branch of Celtic (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995) that has undergone commonlinguistic innovations, there is no evidence that theContinental Celtic languages can be similarly grouped. Instead, the group calledContinental Celtic isparaphyletic; the term refers simply to non-Insular Celtic languages and not to any special linguistic relationship between them as a group other than they are Celtic. Since little material has been preserved of any of the Continental Celtic languages,historical linguistic analysis based on thecomparative method is difficult to perform. However,Gaulish is considered more closely genetically related to theInsular Celtic languages than either of them are to Celtiberian; together, Gaulish and Insular Celtic are key constituents of theNuclear Celtic family. Meanwhile, under the P/Q hypothesis, other researchers see the Brittonic languages and Gaulish as forming part of a subgroup of the Celtic languages that is known asP-Celtic.[4] Under this hypothesis, Continental languages are P-Celtic except for Celtiberian and Gallaecian, which are Q-Celtic. The Continental Celtic languages have had a definite influence on all of theRomance languages.
In the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, and more specifically between the west and north Atlantic coasts and an imaginary line running north-south and linking Oviedo and Merida, there is a corpus of Latin inscriptions with particular characteristics of its own. This corpus contains some linguistic features that are clearly Celtic and others that in our opinion are not Celtic. The former we shall group, for the moment, under the label northwestern Hispano-Celtic. The latter are the same features found in well-documented contemporary inscriptions in the region occupied by the Lusitanians, and therefore belonging to the variety known as LUSITANIAN, or more broadly as GALLO-LUSITANIAN. As we have already said, we do not consider this variety to belong to the Celtic language family.
