Geolinguistic continuities in the Celto-Atlantic area and in Western Europe
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2018-11-10

The archæological discoveries of the last thirty years show at an overwhelming majority that there is no evidence of an Indo-European invasion during the 4th Millennium BC at the scale of the European continent. The traditional “Kourgans’ theory” is confronted with numerous contradictions and constitutes no longer a satisfactory hypothesis. In that context of reconsidering the origin of European languages, the Celtic people would not come anymore from a territory situated between Austria and southern Germany, as being accepted since the nineteenth century. Since the Mesolithic they could have settled as groups of fishermen and seafarers along the Atlantic shores from the Iberian Peninsula to the British Isles passing through the ancient Gaul (Alinei 1996-2000, Alinei-Benozzo 2008, Ballester 2012). On the basis of dialectal and geolinguistic data, this approach tries to understand better this hypothesis. By studying geolinguistic variations, it considers the Celto-Atlantic area and the exchanges it may have had over the long term with the linguistic areas in contact like the Germanic and the Romance one. New lexical insights of Celtic on Romance and Germanic (and vice versa) open research perspectives and raise real questions about the phenomena of the continuity of languages and populations in the Atlantic zone of Europe.

Author: Dr Le Bris, Daniel - Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Presenting author)