Pre-Indo-European languages

Not to be confused with Proto-Indo-European language or Paleo-European languages.
A diagram showing pre-Indo-European languages. Red dots indicate populations before the Indo-European peoples migrated from the steppes.

The pre-Indo-European languages are any of several ancient languages, not necessarily related to one another, that existed in Prehistoric Europe, Asia Minor, Ancient Iran and Southern Asia before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages. The oldest Indo-European language texts are Hittite and date from the 19th century BC in Kültepe (modern eastern Turkey), and while estimates vary widely, the spoken Indo-European languages are believed to have developed at the latest by the 3rd millennium BC (see Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses). Thus, the pre-Indo-European languages must have developed earlier than or, in some cases, alongside the Indo-European languages that ultimately displaced almost all of them.[1][2][3]

A handful of the pre-Indo-European languages are still extant: in Europe, Basque retains a localised strength, with fewer than a million native speakers, but the Dravidian languages remain very widespread in the Indian subcontinent, with over 200 million native speakers (the four major languages being Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam) and the Brahui that stretches into modern Iran. In the Caucasus, Northwest and Northeast Caucasian languages and Kartvelian languages are still intact, with the first having the least language security of the three pre-Indo-European Caucasian language groups. Some[which?] pre-Indo-European languages are attested only as linguistic substrates in Indo-European languages or in toponyms[example needed]. In much of Western Asia (including Iran and Anatolia), the pre-Indo-European, Hurrian/Caucasian, Semitic languages, Dravidian and language isolates have survived to the present day, although Elamite has been entirely supplanted.

  1. ^ David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Oxford, 2010)
  2. ^ Haarmann, Harald. Pre-Indo-European Writing in Old Europe as a Challenge to the Indo-European Intruders Indogermanische Forschungen; Strassburg Vol. 96, (Jan 1, 1991): 1
  3. ^ Roger Blench, Matthew Spriggs (eds.) Archaeology and Language III: Artefacts, Languages and Texts, (2012, Routledge)