Paleo-European languages

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Old European, or Paleo-European, is a designation for the (mostly unknown) languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European family which dominates the continent today. In this sense, Basque and the Caucasian languages are Old European languages (however, the languages spoken today are certainly not identical with the languages that were spoken before the spread of Indo-European - they certainly changed a lot over time). The term Old European, however, is often used more narrowly with reference to the unknown languages of the first Neolithic farmers in central Europe and the Balkan peninsula, who appear to have immigrated from the east around the year 6000 BC.

Traces of lost Old European languages

The prehistoric Old European 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, but are at any rate undeciphered). The only access to them we have are place names and especially river names that are found all over central and western Europe, and possibly loanwords in the Indo-European languages now spoken there. The area across which these Old European river names occur largely coincides with the area where material remains of the central European Neolithic (the so-called Linear Pottery culture) and its daughter cultures, such as the Beaker culture, have been found. The area of the Linear Pottery culture appears to coincide with the "core area" of the Old European Hydronymy where this network is densest.

Theories about Old European languages

There are many theories about these languages. The German linguist Theo Vennemann assumes that most languages of Neolithic Europe were related to Basque, and claims to have found evidence for this in the Old European hydronymy. Most of his colleagues, however, remain unconvinced. Jörg Rhiemeier speculates that some of them - those reflected in the Old European hydronymy - belonged to a language family ("Aquan") related to the Indo-European languages. Some scholars, such as Octavià Alexandre, assume that most Old European languages belong to a phylum called Vasco-Caucasian, a hypothesis that has not yet convinced most linguists, however.

It appears as if the Mediterranean region was home to a substantial number of language families - four have survived unto today, and there is evidence for several others still existing in ancient times - while the area north of the Alps seem to have been dominated by a single large family, according to the evidence of the Old European hydronymy, in Late Neolithic times. This complies well with the results of archaeological research on the spread of Neolithic agriculture in Europe: it is widely assumed that in the Mediterranean, the spread was cultural, i.e. the Mesolithic people adopted farming from neighbours already practicing it, while in the north, it was demic, i.e. by farmers moving in from the east, displacing or assimilating the Mesolithic peoples. Under this model, the Mediterranean Mesolithic linguistic landscape would have changed little but for the spread of Wanderwörter (migratory words) for agricultural concepts, while north of the Alps, the migrating farmers would have established a new single family. This is exactly what can be assumed on the grounds of the linguistic evidence.

If anything can be said about the lost Old European languages on the basis of what we find in the attested ones - Basque, the Caucasian languages and Etruscan -, we can say that the Old European were synthetic languages with rich inflectional morphology and diverse morphosyntactic alignments (Basque and most Caucasian languages are ergative, Georgian split between accusative and active/stative, Etruscan is accusative). The Caucasian languages have very rich phoneme inventories and seem to always have had, but Basque and Etruscan have more moderate phoneme inventories, perhaps reflecting an old east-west cline.

Attested Old European languages

Living

Extinct but fairly richly attested

  • Etruscan - possibly not native to Italy but immigrated from the Aegean region in the Late Bronze Age

Fragmentarily attested

Old European conlangs

Naturally, this lost world has inspired some conlangers to come up with fictional re-creations of these languages. There are several conlangs which represent Old European languages. Some of these are:

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