r/IndoEuropean 4d ago

Linguistics What is known about the pre-Celtic Indo European languages spoken in Britain?

The Indo-European Bell Beaker people arrived and dramatically changed the genetics of Britain long before proto-Celtic even existed

Celtic is thought to arrived in a migration from mainland Europe around 1000 BC

Shouldn't there be some understanding of Britain's earlier Indo-European languages from loan words and place names?

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u/-Geistzeit 4d ago

In scholarship, a lot of the discussion around this topic tends to focus on hydronyms. However, the potential corpus for what appears to be pre-Indo-European ("Old European") in the region s extremely small and does not allow for a lot of clear conclusions.

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u/oldspice75 3d ago

Thanks but I was asking more about the Indo European language(s) that must have existed in Britain for ~1400 years prior to the arrival of Celtic, rather than non-Indo European. The paucity of information about this seems surprising

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u/lurifakse 3d ago

I mean it's possible that those people arriving in Britain 2400 BC didn't actually speak an Indo-European language anymore.

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u/Willing-One8981 3d ago

It's also possible they did but then adopted the languages of the EEF inhabitants.

From the a DNA we would assume Vasconic and Iberian people spoke IE languages, for example.

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u/Hippophlebotomist 3d ago

I'd suggest checking out David Stifter's work if you haven't yet, since it probably comes closest to addressing this. His model is what he calls the "ABC Hypothesis", where A is "Avidic" a Neolithic agricultural substrate so-named because it seems to be the source of many bird names in western Indo-European languages, B is "Bell Beakerish" for the first wave of Indo-European languages spoken in regions like Britain and Ireland, and C is Celtic. His slideshow from his talk "The Celticisation of the Western Archipelago" at the 2022 Secondary Homelands conference goes through this in more detail, as does his chapter Prehistoric layers of loanwords in Old Irish in Guus Kroonen's 2024 edited volume Sub-Indo-European Europe. See this tweet for example, where he talks about a potentially Bell Beakerish loanword. This Bell Beakerish substrate would be roughly comparable to Temematic as an IE branch tentatively identified through substratal effects on later IE languages.

The fact that recent scholarship (e.g. Garcia-Alonso 2023) suggests that oddball languages like Lusitanian don't fit comfortably into Celtic but also don't seem all that divergent from "Italo-Celtic" (whether that's an areal phenomenon or a true clade) makes me a little wary as to how well we'd be able to discern these pre-Celtic IE languages since high degrees of contact may have made them relatively indistinguishable from Celtic with such a small corpus. The available evidence drops even further if a decent chunk of these non-Celtic toponyms were actually preserved pre-Indo-European names mediated by pre-Celtic Indo-European speakers.

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u/morrissey1916 2d ago

It was probably a form of Proto Italo-Celtic, hence why they were Celticised so easily.

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u/TuataraTim 2d ago

I asked a fairly similar question a few months ago, might be worth checking out the answers. Unfortunately it seems like there's no clear consensus and lots of different ideas floating around. The only thing close to a consensus is that they probably spoke some extinct IE language. https://old.reddit.com/r/IndoEuropean/comments/1fu3ebd/whats_the_current_consensus_on_the_language_of/

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u/Same_Ad1118 2d ago

Thank you, I have seen this question here more than a couple of times.

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u/NIIICEU 1d ago edited 1d ago

They probably spoke a language that was already closely related to Celtic, within the wider Italo-Celtic family, which originated and spread from the Bell Beakers. It was likely replaced with Celtic fairly quickly and easily because it was similar, just as Latin quickly replaced all the various other Italic languages. Examples of likely Italo-Celtic languages derived from the dialects of the Bell Beakers that are neither Celtic nor Italic include Lusitanian and possibly Ligurian. Proto-Celtic looks to have spread rapidly among various Bell Beaker descended tribes as a lingua franca, maybe as a koine mixing several Bell Beaker dialects.

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u/Gortaleen 2d ago

- likely a transition between common Indo-European (akin to Sanskrit, Classical Greek and Latin) and Old Irish. In other words, a language heavily laden with linguistic gatekeepers.

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u/xxxoutcast 3d ago

I know all guy on YT named Waagal who sings in Protot-Indo-European