, where Celtic languages are spoken today, or were spoken into the modern era: s. The third plaque is the longest text discovered in any ancient Celtic language. However, this plaque is inscribed in Latin script. Celtic is typically divided into various branches: •
Continental Celtic languages, a fully extinct branch spoken in the continental Europe. •
Insular Celtic languages, spoken in the British Isles and Brittany in modernity. •
Hispano-Celtic languages, typically subbranch of Continental Celtic, including Celtiberian and Gallaecian. •
Celtiberian, also called Eastern or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic, was spoken in the ancient
Iberian Peninsula, in the eastern part of
Old Castile and south of
Aragon (modern provinces: Segovia, Burgos, Soria, Guadalajara, Cuenca, Zaragoza and Teruel) The relationship of Celtiberian with
Gallaecian, in northwest Iberia, is uncertain. •
Gallaecian, also known as Western or Northwestern Hispano-Celtic, was spoken in the northwest of the peninsula (modern
Northern Portugal, and the Spanish regions of
Galicia,
Asturias and northwestern
Castile and León). •
Lepontic, part of Continental Celtic languages, the oldest attested Celtic language (from the 6th century BC). •
Gaulish languages, once spoken in a wide arc from
Belgium to modern-day
Turkey, but all extinct since 7-8th centuries AD. •
Transalpine Gaulish, spoken in the modern area of France, Switzerland and parts of Germany. •
Cisalpine Gaulish, a proposed language documented in inscriptions, distinct from Transalpine Gaulish and closer to Lepontic, spoken in
Northern Italy until the 1st century BC. •
Galatian, spoken in central Anatolia potentially for as long as 6th century AD. •
Brittonic, spoken in
Great Britain and
Brittany. Including the living languages
Breton,
Cornish, and
Welsh, and the lost
Cumbric and potentially
Pictish. Before the arrival of Scotti on the Isle of Man in the 9th century, the island may have spoken a Brythonic language. The theory of a Brittonic
Ivernic language predating Goidelic speech in Ireland has been suggested, but is widely rejected. Some earlier theories consider Pictish a
pre-Indo-European language, but the theory is not widely supported. •
Goidelic, including the extant
Irish,
Manx, and
Scottish Gaelic, spoken in modern Scotland, Ireland and Isle of Man.
Continental/Insular Celtic and P/Q-Celtic hypotheses Scholarly handling of Celtic languages has been contentious owing to scarceness of primary source data. Some scholars (such as Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; and Schrijver 1995) posit that the primary distinction is between
Continental Celtic and
Insular Celtic, arguing that the differences between the
Goidelic and
Brittonic languages arose after these split off from the Continental Celtic languages. Other scholars (such as Schmidt 1988) make the primary distinction between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic languages based on the replacement of initial Q by initial P in some words. Most of the
Gallic and Brittonic languages are P-Celtic, while the Goidelic and Hispano-Celtic languages are Q-Celtic. The P-Celtic languages (also called
Gallo-Brittonic) are sometimes seen (for example by Koch 1992) as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. According to
Ranko Matasović in the introduction to his 2009
Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic: "Celtiberian ... is almost certainly an independent branch on the Celtic genealogical tree, one that became separated from the others very early." The Breton language is Brittonic, not Gaulish; though there may be some input from the latter, having been introduced from Southwestern regions of Britain in the post-Roman era. In the P/Q classification schema, the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic was Gaelic. It has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic, but others see as also being in the Brittonic languages (see Schmidt). In the Insular/Continental classification schema, the split of the former into Gaelic and Brittonic is seen as being late. The distinction of Celtic into these four sub-families most likely occurred about 900 BC according to Gray & Atkinson but, because of estimation uncertainty, it could be any time between 1200 and 800 BC. However, they only considered Gaelic and Brythonic. A controversial paper by Forster & Toth included Gaulish and put the break-up much earlier at 3200 BC ± 1500 years. They support the Insular Celtic hypothesis. The early Celts were commonly associated with the archaeological
Urnfield culture, the
Hallstatt culture, and the
La Tène culture, though the earlier assumption of association between language and culture is now considered to be less strong. There are legitimate scholarly arguments for both the Insular Celtic hypothesis and the P-/Q-Celtic hypothesis. Proponents of each schema dispute the accuracy and usefulness of the other's categories. However, since the 1970s the division into Insular and Continental Celtic has become the more widely held view (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995), but in the middle of the 1980s, the P-/Q-Celtic theory found new supporters (Lambert 1994), because of the inscription on the Larzac piece of lead (1983), the analysis of which reveals another common phonetical innovation
-nm- >
-nu (Gaelic / Gaulish , Old Welsh 'names'), that is less accidental than only one. The discovery of a third common innovation would allow the specialists to come to the conclusion of a
Gallo-Brittonic dialect (Schmidt 1986; Fleuriot 1986). The interpretation of this and further evidence is still quite contested, and the main argument for Insular Celtic is connected with the development of verbal morphology and the syntax in Irish and British Celtic, which Schumacher regards as convincing, while he considers the P-Celtic/Q-Celtic division unimportant and treats Gallo-Brittonic as an outdated theory. Stifter affirms that the Gallo-Brittonic view is "out of favour" in the scholarly community as of 2008 and the Insular Celtic hypothesis "widely accepted". When referring only to the modern Celtic languages, since no Continental Celtic language has living descendants, "Q-Celtic" is equivalent to "Goidelic" and "P-Celtic" is equivalent to "Brittonic". How the family tree of the Celtic languages is ordered depends on which hypothesis is used: "
Insular Celtic hypothesis" •
Proto-Celtic •
Continental Celtic •
Celtiberian •
Gallaecian •
Gaulish •
Insular Celtic •
Brittonic •
Goidelic "
P/Q-Celtic hypothesis" •
Proto-Celtic • Q-Celtic •
Celtiberian •
Gallaecian •
Goidelic •
P-Celtic •
Gaulish •
Brittonic •
Pritenic?
Eska (2010) Eska evaluates the evidence as supporting the following tree, based on
shared innovations, though it is not always clear that the innovations are not
areal features. It seems likely that Celtiberian split off before Cisalpine Celtic, but the evidence for this is not robust. On the other hand, the unity of Gaulish, Goidelic, and Brittonic is reasonably secure. Schumacher (2004, p. 86) had already cautiously considered this grouping to be likely genetic, based, among others, on the shared reformation of the sentence-initial, fully inflecting relative pronoun
*i̯os, *i̯ā, *i̯od into an uninflected enclitic particle. Eska sees
Cisalpine Gaulish as more akin to Lepontic than to Transalpine Gaulish. •
Celtic •
Hispano-Celtic •
Celtiberian •
Gallaecian •
Nuclear Celtic •
Cisalpine Celtic:
Lepontic →
Cisalpine Gaulish • Core Celtic (secure) •
Transalpine Gaulish ("Transalpine Celtic") •
Insular Celtic •
Goidelic •
Brittonic Eska considers a division of Transalpine–Goidelic–Brittonic into Transalpine and Insular Celtic to be most probable because of the greater number of innovations in Insular Celtic than in P-Celtic, and because the Insular Celtic languages were probably not in great enough contact for those innovations to spread as part of a
sprachbund. However, if they have another explanation (such as an
SOV substratum language), then it is possible that P-Celtic is a valid clade, and the top branching would be: • Core Celtic (P-Celtic hypothesis) •
Goidelic •
Gallo-Brittonic •
Transalpine Gaulish ("Transalpine Celtic") •
Brittonic Italo-Celtic Within the
Indo-European family, the Celtic languages have sometimes been placed with the
Italic languages in a common
Italo-Celtic subfamily. This hypothesis fell somewhat out of favour after reexamination by American linguist
Calvert Watkins in 1966. Irrespectively, some scholars such as Ringe, Warnow and Taylor and many others have argued in favour of an Italo-Celtic grouping in 21st century theses. == Characteristics ==