The Celtic languages are a branch of the Indo-European family of languages, which includes Greek, Latin, Iranian, Urdu, Hindi and the modern Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. Today, Celtic has the smallest number of speakers of any of the Indo-European language groups but around 300 bc it was probably the most widespread language group in Europe, being spoken from the river Dnepr to the Atlantic Ocean. Celtic exists in two forms, which both originated in prehistoric times, p-Celtic and q-Celtic. In ancient times q-Celtic was spoken in Iberia and Ireland, spreading to Scotland and the Isle of Man in the early Middle Ages. P-Celtic, which was the more widespread, was spoken in Britain, Gaul, northern Italy, central Europe and Anatolia. The ancient forms of q-Celtic included Hispano-Celtic and GoideUc (the ancestor of modern Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic), while p-Celtic included Gaulish, Lepontic and Brithonic (the ancestor of modern Welsh, Breton and Cornish). The division into p - and q-Celtic is based on phonological differences, as seen, for instance, between Welsh map (‘son’) and its Gaelic equivalent mac.
The Indo-European languages were not originally indigenous to Europe. The earliest known languages of Europe were all completely unrelated to the Indo-European languages. Some, such as Minoan, Etruscan and Iberian, are known from inscriptions; the existence of others can be inferred from place names or words in later languages. Probably the only survivor of these early languages is Euskara, the language of the Basques: Indo-European languages had displaced all the others by the early first millennium ad. The modern Indo-European languages are all descended from a common ancestor that is known to linguists as Proto-Indo-European. Though other homelands have been proposed, notably Anatolia, most linguists believe that the original Indo-European speakers were a nomadic pastoralist people who lived on the steppes of western Central Asia around 4000 bc. The language was subsequently spread by migrations into India, the Middle East and Europe, where it began to diversify into its modern daughter languages as different groups settled down and lost contact with one another. As it is known that Indo-European languages were being spoken in Europe soon after 2000 bc, linguists argue that these migrations must have taken place some time in the third or fourth millennium bc. Many attempts have been made to identify a specific archaeological culture with the early Indo-Europeans. The best candidate is the Yamnaya culture, which flourished c. 3500-2500 bc on the steppes north of the Caspian Sea. The Yamnaya people were the earliest to combine pastoralism
(sheep, cattle and horses) with wheeled vehicles. This mobility allowed them to adopt a migratory lifestyle, moving their flocks and herds long distances across the steppes in search of fresh pastures. By 2500 bc groups of Yamnaya people had spread east of the Urals onto the Asian steppes and west across the Ukrainian steppes into south-east Europe, which is compatible with the linguistic evidence for the arrival of Indo-European speakers in Europe. Recently discovered mummies from the Tarim Basin in Chinese Turkestan show that tall, fair-skinned, lighthaired people who tattooed their skin and wore tartan were living on the steppes 4,000 years ago. Though their appearance fits closely with descriptions of the ancient Celts, these people were not Celts but Tocharians, a now extinct Indo-European-speaking nomad people. Through contacts with these people the early Chinese learned of bronze, wheeled vehicles and domesticated horses.
Exactly when and where the Celtic languages developed from Proto-Indo-European is a matter of dispute. Most linguists believe that the Celtic languages probably emerged in approximately the area of central Europe that the Hallstatt culture developed in and that they were subsequently spread to western Europe by migrants who displaced or, more likely, assimilated the indigenous population. The spread of ornamental metalwork styles, such as the Hallstatt style, is seen as material evidence of these migrations. Critics of this view argue that the evidence of prehistoric Celtic migrations is far from conclusive. Ornamental metalwork styles, religious beliefs and burial customs could just as easily have been spread as a result of trade and social contacts as by migrating peoples. It was once believed, for example, that widespread cultural changes that marked the beginning of the Iron Age in Britain were the result of Celtic immigration. Now it is known, from excavations of sites that span the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, such as Runnymede Bridge on the river Thames, that these changes were entirely indigenous developments. It may or may not be significant in this respect that the ancient Britons regarded themselves as the aboriginal population of Britain. There is also a growing appreciation of the way that ethnic groups expand as much by recruitment and assimilation as by biological reproduction. This is supported by an increasing body of evidence for a high degree of genetic continuity in European populations between the end of the Ice Age and the Migration Period at the beginning of the Middle Ages. This seems to rule out the possibility of large-scale prehistoric Celtic migrations to Britain and Ireland, for example (though not smaller-scale folk movements, which certainly did take place). Archaeologists, especially in Britain, are now gripped by a doctrine of immobilism that virtually denies any important role to migrations as agents of cultural change. But if there were no migrations of Celtic-speaking peoples, how did Gaul, Spain, Britain and Ireland become Celtic-speaking?
The archaeologist CoUn Renfrew has proposed an alternative theory that explains the spread of Celtic languages without recourse to
Migrations. Renfrew proposes that the original Indo-European homeland was not in Central Asia but in Anatolia, which before the arrival of the Turks in the Middle Ages was an Indo-European-speaking area. Proto-Indo-European was introduced to south-east Europe from Anatolia by the first farmers who arrived there around 7000 bc, and was subsequently spread, along with the farming way of life, to most of Europe by 4000 bc. Proto-Indo-European’s European daughter languages, including the Celtic languages, then developed across much the same areas that they were spoken in at the beginning of historical times. In other words, Gaulish could have developed from Proto-Indo-European in Gaul, Brithonic in Britain, Hispano-Celtic in Iberia and so on. Although it has an elegant simplicity, and fits the archaeological evidence, Renfrew’s theory is not acceptable to linguists on the grounds that they beUeve that Proto-Indo-European could not have been spoken as early as 7000 bc. The question of prehistoric Celtic migrations therefore remains open. However, while there can be little doubt that the culture of the Celts spread more widely than their DNA, we should be wary of ruling out prehistoric Celtic migrations when their propensity to migrate in historical times is so well attested.
World History
