The clearest division is between the Continental and Insular Celtic languages.
If you imagine the evolution of Proto-Celtic into the Celtic languages like a tree, there have been a few distinct moments of branching off. There are noticeable similarities between them, however, and some are closer than others. įor the most part, Celtic languages are not mutually intelligible, meaning that speaking one will not unlock your ability to understand the others automatically. Here are all six languages broken down, using figures from Ethnologue. In any case, there are about 2 million speakers of Celtic languages, both native and non-native. Manx and Cornish are both technically “dead” languages, because they have no native speakers, but they both have communities that are attempting to revive them. Many Celtic languages were nearly wiped out by the English language, and so today are fighting for their survival. Irish, for example, is the largest living Celtic language with over a million speakers, but only about 10 percent are native speakers of the language. While four of the six languages have a significant number of speakers, there is often a large disparity between native speakers and non-native speakers. How Many People Speak A Celtic Language?įiguring out the exact number of Celtic speakers is a difficult task. These languages disappeared for various reasons, though the Roman conquest of the continent was a major contributing factor.
Many of the fully extinct and “dead” Celtic languages - those that are only spoken by non-native speakers currently - are the ones that evolved in Continental Europe, including Celtiberian (spoken on the Iberian peninsula), Galatian (spoken in Galatia, or modern-day Turkey), Gaulish (spoken in a huge region of Central Europe including parts of modern-day France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy) and Lepontic (spoken in Northern Italy and Switzerland). Of those, only six are still spoken today: Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, Cornish and Welsh. There are approximately 16 Celtic languages to have ever existed. Over the following centuries, Proto-Celtic spread throughout Europe and made the leap to Ireland at some point before the fourth century BCE, which is the date of the earliest Irish writing. And while the remaining living Celtic languages are all clustered in the British Isles, Proto-Celtic came from Central Europe in the “Hallstatt Zone.” This zone demarcates a collection of cultures that existed during the Bronze Age in the region that today is the border between Germany and Austria. Proto-Celtic evolved from Proto-Indo-European around roughly 1300 BCE. There is no written record of Proto-Celtic, but historical linguists have reconstructed the language by comparing the remaining Celtic languages today. The Celtic languages are all of those that descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic. Compared to some of the other sub-families, like Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, it’s relatively small, but it has lasting cultural importance and is an important part of linguistic diversity in the British Isles. One of the many sub-families of the Indo-European language family is the Celtic language family. This family includes some of the most-spoken languages in the world, including French, Spanish, English and Hindi. Hundreds of the languages spoken throughout the world all descend from one common root: proto-Indo-European. The Indo-European language family is massive.