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Concept
Paleo-European languages
Summary
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.
The term Old European languages is also often used more narrowly to refer only to the unknown languages of the first Neolithic European farmers in Southeastern, Southern, Central and Western Europe, who emigrated from Anatolia around 8000–6000 BC, excluding unknown languages of various European hunter gatherers who were eventually absorbed by farming populations by the late Neolithic Age.
A similar term, Pre-Indo-European, is used to refer to the disparate languages mostly displaced by speakers of Proto-Indo-European as they migrated out of their Urheimat. This term thus includes certain Paleo-European languages along with many others spoken in West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia before the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their descendants arrived.
The prehistoric Paleolithic and Mesolithic modern human hunter-gatherer Paleo-European languages and Neolithic Anatolian and European farmer languages are not attested in writing (but see Old European script for a set of undeciphered signs that were used in the Vinča culture, which may or may not have been a writing system). The only sources for some of them are place names and especially river names that are found all over central and western Europe, and possibly loanwords in some Indo-European languages now spoken there.
Paleohispanic languages
Basque (Euskara) – the only surviving language
Aquitanian – A close relative to, or a direct ancestor of, Modern Basque.
Proto-Basque
Iberian – Perhaps a relative to Aquitanian and Basque: maybe even ancestral to both, but not confirmed.
Official source
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