Continental Celtic
Geographic distribution	Continental Europe, Anatolia
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Celtic Continental Celtic
Subdivisions	Gaulish Hispano-Celtic Lepontic Noric
Glottolog	None
Celtic languages during the Iron Age and classical Antiquity. 1: early Iron Age core region (Hallstatt -H-, early La Tène -L-) 2: assumed Celtic expansion by the 4th century BC L: La Tène site H: Hallstatt site I: Iberia B: British Isles G: Galatia, settled in the 3rd century BC (after 279 BC)

The Continental Celtic languages are the now-extinct group of the Celtic languages that were spoken on the continent of Europe and in central Anatolia, as distinguished from the Insular Celtic languages of the British Isles and Brittany. In the field of historical linguistics, Continental and Insular Celtic are put forward as the main branches of the group, which is itself a branch of the Indo-European languages. As the word branch implies, this field primarily makes use of the family tree analogy. Indo-European is a tree with all the different groups as branches. No branches, no tree, and vice versa.

Not all the branches, however, are known. There are alternative hypotheses of the exact paths between known branches. For this reason, the late linguist, Calvert Watkins, omits the upper branch lines between Proto-Indo-European and the various major daughter groups in his circular presentation of the tree on the rear fly leaves of the Fourth and other editions of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, containing his essay "Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans" and his appendix on Indo-European roots. There are in that edition 15 major groups, some containing only one language. Theorists can connect these major branches according to their groupings.

The insular and continental branches

The branch labelled Celtic is divided into Insular and Continental. As they are branches, and not random groups, it is important to understand what that terminology means.

Suppose that over time a population P speaking a language L varies its speech so that in place of one population speaking one language are now two populations, P1 and P2, speaking two languages, L1 and L1. The latter are called sister languages, while L is depending on the speaker's preference a mother language, a parent language, an ancestor language, or a proto-language. L1 and L2 are daughter languages. Obviously any daughter language can itself be a proto-language, so that over time the degree of branching can become very great, as in Ethnologue's language trees.^[2] They might also be very ornate and artistic.^[3]

In practice the historical linguist reconstructs the proto-language from the daughter languages by the methods of comparative linguistics. A minimum of two languages are compared, typically feature by feature.

Questions and answers of classification

The double classification of Celtic

The modern term Continental Celtic is used in contrast to Insular Celtic. However, while many researchers agree with the Insular Celtic hypothesis that the Insular Celtic languages constitute a linguistically distinct branch of Celtic (Cowgill 1975; McCone 1991, 1992; Schrijver 1995) that has undergone common linguistic innovations, there is no evidence that the Continental Celtic languages can be similarly grouped. Instead, the group called Continental Celtic is paraphyletic; the term refers simply to non-Insular Celtic languages and not to any special linguistic relationship between them as a group other than they are Celtic. Since little material has been preserved of any of the Continental Celtic languages, historical linguistic analysis based on the comparative method is difficult to perform. Meanwhile, under the P/Q hypothesis, other researchers see the Brittonic languages and Gaulish as forming part of a subgroup of the Celtic languages that is known as P-Celtic.^[4] Under this hypothesis, Continental languages are P-Celtic except for Celtiberian and Gallaecian, which are Q-Celtic. The Continental Celtic languages have had a definite influence on all of the Romance languages. Even though Breton has been spoken in Continental Europe since at least the 6th century AD, it is not considered one of the Continental Celtic languages, as it is a Brittonic language, like Cornish and Welsh. A Gaulish substratum in Breton has been suggested, but that is debated.

Eliminating the doubt with hearsay and conjecture

Hypothetical languages

These languages were spoken by the people known to Roman and Greek writers as the Keltoi, Celtae, Galli, and Galatae.^{[citation needed]} They were spoken in an area arcing from the northern half of Iberia in the west to north of Belgium, and east to the Carpathian basin and the Balkans as Noric, and in inner Anatolia (modern day Turkey) as Galatian.

It is likely that Celts spoke dozens of different languages and dialects across Europe in pre-Roman times, but only a small number are either attested or infered from circumstantial evidence. The exact list varies according to the theorist and the state of the evidence. Currently there is evidence (not necessarily from comparative linguistics) for these branches:

• Lepontic (6th to 4th century BC)^[5] was spoken on the southern side of the Alps. It is evidenced in a number of inscriptions as well as place names.
• Gaulish (3rd century BC to 5th (?) century AD)^[5] was the main language spoken in greater Gaul. This is often considered to be divided into two dialects, Cisalpine (spoken in what is now Italy) and Transalpine (spoken in what is now France). It is evidenced in a number of inscriptions as well as place names and tribal names in writings of classical authors. It may have been a substratum to Breton (see below).
• Galatian, which was spoken in the region of Ankara of what is now central Turkey. Classical writers say that the language is similar to that of Gaul. There is also evidence of invasion and settlement of the Ankara area by Celts from Europe.
• Noric, which is the name given sometimes to the Celtic spoken in Central and Eastern Europe. It was spoken in Austria and Slovenia; only two fragmentary texts are preserved.
• Celtiberian or Northeastern Hispano-Celtic (3rd to 1st century BC)^[5] is the name given to the language in northeast Iberia, between the headwaters of the Douro, Tagus, Júcar and Turía rivers and the Ebro river. It is attested in some 200 inscriptions as well as place names. It is distinct from Iberian.
• Gallaecian also called Gallaic or Northwestern Hispano-Celtic, attested in a set (corpus) of Latin inscriptions containing isolated words and sentences that are unmistakably Celtic.^[6][7] It was spoken in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula comprising today's Spanish regions of Galicia, western Asturias and western Castile and León, and the Norte Region in northern Portugal.