The Paleo-European languages, or Old European languages, are the mostly unknown languages that were spoken in Europe prior to the spread of the Indo-European and Uralic families caused by the Bronze Age invasion from the Eurasian steppe of pastoralists whose descendant languages dominate the continent today.[1][2] The vast majority of modern European populations speak Indo-European languages, but until the Bronze Age, it was the opposite, with Paleo-European languages of non-Indo-European affiliation dominating the linguistic landscape of Europe.[3]
The term Old European languages is also often used more narrowly to refer only to the unknown languages of the first Neolithic European farmers in Southeastern, Southern, Central and Western Europe, who emigrated from Anatolia around 8000–6000 BC, excluding unknown languages of various European hunter gatherers who were eventually absorbed by farming populations by the late Neolithic Age.[2]
A similar term, Pre-Indo-European, is used to refer to the disparate languages mostly displaced by speakers of Proto-Indo-European as they migrated out of their Urheimat. This term thus includes certain Paleo-European languages along with many others spoken in West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia before the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their descendants arrived.
- ^ "Story of most murderous people of all time revealed in ancient DNA | New Scientist".
- ^ a b Haarmann, Harald (2014). "Ethnicity and Language in the Ancient Mediterranean". In McInerney, Jeremy (ed.). A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 17–33. doi:10.1002/9781118834312.ch2. ISBN 9781444337341.
- ^ Haarmann, Harald (2011). Das Rätsel der Donauzivilisation: Die Entdeckung der ältestenHochkultur Europas (in German). Munchen: C. H. Beck. pp. 62–63.