Iberian language

Iberian
Native toModern Spain and France
RegionMediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula
Extinct1st century AD[1]
Iberian scripts
Language codes
ISO 639-3xib
xib
Glottologiber1250
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

The Iberian language was the language of an indigenous western European people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula in the pre-Migration Era (before about AD 375). An ancient Iberian culture can be identified as existing between the 7th and 1st centuries BC, at least.

Iberian, like all the other Paleohispanic languages except Basque, was extinct by the 1st to 2nd centuries AD. It had been replaced gradually by Latin, following the Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Iberian language is unclassified: while the scripts used to write it have been deciphered to various extents, the language itself remains largely unknown. Links with other languages have been suggested, especially the Basque language, based largely on the observed similarities between the numerical systems of the two. In contrast, the Punic language of Carthaginian settlers was Semitic, while Indo-European languages of the peninsula during the Iron Age include the now extinct Celtiberian language, Ionic Greek, and Latin, which formed the basis for modern Iberian Romance languages, but none of these were related to the Iberian language.

  1. ^ "Iberian". Archived from the original on 17 January 2015. Retrieved 2024-01-30.