Language isolates in Europe.
Tartessian (light blue): The language was spoken before the Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula. Linguists have yet to establish a link between Tartessian and the surrounding languages. It was first thought to be a member the Celtic family but syllable structure analyses have dismissed this hypothesis. The language is speculated to be a language isolate or linked with non-Indo-European tongues like Iberian and Basque.
Iberian (orange): Another language that was in the peninsula before the Roman came. Latest works estimate that Iberian was a lingua franca/a koinè; meaning that it was not the maternal language of an ethnic group but rather a language that developed when people of different languages or dialects came into contact. There is no proven connexion between Basque and Iberian.
Basque (red): the only European isolate still spoken to this day, with approximatively 1 102 391 speakers in Spain and France. Basque most likely antedates the arrival of Indo-Europeans on the continent. There are countless hypotheses about the language family to which Basque belongs to but none has had any success. As explained above, there might be a common history between Iberian and Basque but nothing is sure. A possible ancestor to Basque could be Aquitan, which was the name given to the Basque in Ancient history.
Pictish (dark blue): Native to Scotland, Pictish spread from the southern border with today’s England to the Shetland Islands. There again, there are heated disputes regarding the family of Pictish. Some schools of thought link Pictish with pre Indo-European populations, others with Germanic tribes while others see in the isolate a potential Celtic language. The last option might be the closest to the truth. The name Pictish bears a certain likeness to the Pictons, a tribe of Celtic descent that gave its name to one of France’s regions, Poitou-Charentes, above Bordeaux and its biggest city, Poitiers. With too little evidence, Pictish has yet to be categorised.
Etruscan (dark green): Etruscan is not an isolate per se. Likely relatives were found in the Alps and the Aegean Sea. Approximatively 10,000 inscriptions have been found but none is of great length and even fewer bilingual inscriptions with Latin or Greek. Though unrelated to modern speeches, linguists mostly agree upon its membership to the Tyrsenian/ Tyrrhenian languages. Etruscan is of significant importance because it is through its speakers that the Greek alphabet reached Latin-speaking areas.
Rhaetic (light green): A potential cousin of Etruscan spoken in the Alps. Its linguistic categorisation is not clearly established, and it presents a confusing mixture of what appear to be Etruscan, Indo-European, and uncertain other elements. Rhaetic could be a cousin of Etruscan, member of the Tyrsenian/Tyrrhenian family, an Indo-European language with ties to the Illyrian languages (native to the Balkans) and Celtic. A third hypothesis could be that Rhaetic is unrelated to other languages but was influenced by Etruscan.
Lemnian (lighter green): Lamnian is native to the island of Lemnos, in the Aegean Sea, between the coasts of mainland Greece and Turkey. The family bond between Etruscan and Lemnian stems from inscriptions found on funerary stele written in the Etruscan alphabet, proximity in vocabulary and grammar. Phonetic reconstructions concluded that Lemnian had a four-vowel system, which could have developed under the influence of Hittite (from the Anatolian branch of Indo-European group) and Akkadian (from the Semitic family) in modern-day Turkey and Middle East.
Pelasgian (purple): Little is known about it except that Pelasgian is native to Greece. The etymology of Pelasgian remains a mystery but it was the name given by the Greeks of old to their predecessors, meaning “sea”. The influence of the language can be found in the names of localities and deities in Greece; some non IE sound sequences can be found, such as “-nth-“ (e.g., Corinth, Probalinthos, Zakynthos, Amarynthos) or names like Athena, Thebes or Delphi.
Eteocretan (blue): Analysing the written traces gave little to no information about the true nature of Eteocretan, however, it was sufficient to claim that it was neither part of the Indo-European nor the Semitic families. Eteocretan means “true Cretan”. The inscriptions found were written with the Greek alphabet but did not make sense in Greek. It is believed that Eteocretan is a descendant of the Minoan language, the language of the Minoans, whose civilisation arose on the very same island. A writing system called the Linear A (dating back to 2500–1450 B.C) was found on Crete and could be Eteocretan ancestor.
Eteocypriot (brown): the “True Cyprian” language has left very few engravements for archeologists and linguists to work on. Written in a derivative of the Cretan Linear A, Eteocypriot is speculated to be a member of the Tyrsenian/ Tyrrhenian family (and therefore a cousin to Etruscan) or from the Northwest Semitic (like Aramaic, the language that Jesus supposedly spoke).
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