Gallaecian language
| Gallaecian | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Iberian Peninsula |
| Era | attested beginning of the first millennium CE |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 |
None (mis) |
| Glottolog | None |
Northwestern Hispano-Celtic or Gallaecian is an extinct Celtic language, and was one of the Hispano-Celtic languages. It was spoken at the beginning of the 1st millennium in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula that became the Roman province of Gallaecia, and is now divided between the modern regions of Galicia, western Asturias, the Province of León and Norte Region, Portugal.
As with the Illyrian and Ligurian languages, the surviving corpus of Gallaecian is composed of isolated words and short sentences contained in local Latin inscriptions or glossed by classical authors, together with a number of names – anthroponyms, ethnonyms, theonyms, toponyms – contained in inscriptions, or surviving as the names of places, rivers or mountains. In addition, many isolated words of Celtic origin preserved in the present-day Romance languages of north-west Spain and Portugal, are likely to have been inherited from ancient Gallaecian.
Classical authors such as Pomponius Mela and Pliny the Elder wrote about the existence of Celtic and non-Celtic populations in Gallaecia and Lusitania, but several modern scholars have postulated Lusitanian and Gallaecian as a single archaic Celtic language. Others point to major unresolved problems for this hypothesis, such as the mutually incompatible phonetic features, most notably the proposed preservation of *p in Lusitanian and the inconsistent outcome of the vocalic liquid consonants, so addressing Lusitanian as a non-Celtic language and unrelated to Gallaecian, although cultural influences were likely.
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