Celtic languages

Los celtas sí, en todas partes.

The Celtic expansion did not occur overnight.

Around 1200 BC, during the Late Bronze Age, the Celtic culture began to emerge in Central Europe, and centuries were needed for this culture to really spread.

Around 700 BC, you start to see what archaeologists call the Halstatt culture, Estos primeros celtas con sus armas de hierro y su forma característica de enterrar a los muertos, junto con equipo de guerrero y refinados trabajos en metal, están apareciendo por todas partes y, lenta y gradualmente, se desplazan hacia el exterior like a wave in slow motion that will end up crashing against the Mediterranean civilizations.

But the true explosion, the moment in which the Celtic identity really crystallizes and extends everywhere, comes with the Latin culture around the 5th century BC.

Es entonces cuando empiezas a ver esos increíbles e intrincados diseños artísticos aparecer en armas, joyas y todo tipo de objetos.

Es entonces cuando el mundo celta se vuelve realmente reconocible.

But, in some way, despite being scattered across a huge continent, separated by mountains, forests and seas, and despite not having a central government, a unified army, nor an emperor or king to rule over all of them, they maintained an extraordinary cultural cohesion.

Italic as the branches included Latin, and Latin's descendants eventually became the Romance languages, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian among them.

Germanic gave us English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages, while Celtic survives in languages such as Irish, Welsh and Breton.

Baltoslavic gives us Lithuanian and Latvian on the Baltic side, and languages such as Russian, Polish, Czech and Bulgarian on the Slavic side.

But the family also contains some remarkable extinct branches.

We might also ask ourselves, how does one ancestral language end up producing languages spoken across such a vast area? The short answer is movement, separation and time, although the real story is considerably less streamlined than a series of arrows on a map.

As Indo-European speaking populations expanded and became separated from one another, different groups carried their languages in different directions.

Some moved westwards into Europe, where their descendants eventually produced branches such as Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, as well as Greek and others.

Other populations moved southwards into Anatolia and the Aegean, giving rise to the Anatolian languages and contributing to the long history of Greek.