The History of the European languages 4000 BC - 2021 AD

[HorusHeresist]

1500 BC-400 AD Slavic language afk.
500 AD - Slavic language returns to keyboard and breaks the meta.

[Clover_el_alma_amarilla]

Only one mistake: Maghrebi Arabic for the Iberian Peninsula gradually gained its own features and by the year 900 or so it was already an independent dialect called Andalusian Arabic.

[LukaBEET]

"It is no nation we inhabit but a language. Make no mistake, our native tongue is our true fatherland" Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran first heard of in Metal Gera Solid V

[Salomon-pyeu]

Nakh/chechen people just chilling in the same place for 5000 years and still being there as a small distinct language is honesty crazy

[NovemberTheHacker]

Also some info for Sardinia.
Although the colonists and negotiatores (businessmen) of strictly Italic descent would later play a relevant role in introducing and spreading Latin to Sardinia, Romanisation proved slow to take hold among the Sardinian natives, whose proximity to the Carthaginian cultural influence was noted by Roman authors. Punic continued to be spoken well into the 3rd-4th century AD, as attested by votive inscriptions, and it is thought that the natives from the most interior areas, led by the tribal chief Hospito, joined their brethren in making the switch to Latin around the 7th century AD, through their conversion to Christianity.

From the article on Sardinian language > History > Classical period (4 sources are listed for the cited paragraph)


By the end of the Roman domination, Latin had gradually become however the speech of most of the island's inhabitants.
- Casula, Francesco Cesare (1994). La Storia di Sardegna. Sassari, it: Carlo Delfino Editore.

[NovemberTheHacker]

A few notes on the Albanian language historical presence and location:
Latin domination of the coastal and plain areas of the country, rather than evidence of the original environment in which the Albanian language was formed. For example, the word for 'fish' is borrowed from Latin, but not the word for 'gills' which is native. Indigenous are also the words for 'ship', 'raft', 'navigation', 'sea shelves' and a few names of fish kinds, but not the words for 'sail', 'row' and 'harbor'; objects pertaining to navigation itself and a large part of sea fauna. This rather shows that Proto-Albanians were pushed away from coastal areas in early times (probably after the Latin conquest of the region) and thus lost a large amount (or the majority) of their sea environment lexicon. A similar phenomenon could be observed with agricultural terms. While the words for 'arable land', 'corn', 'wheat', 'cereals', 'vineyard', 'yoke', 'harvesting', 'cattle breeding', etc. are native, the words for 'ploughing', 'farm' and 'farmer', agricultural practices, and some harvesting tools are foreign.

Late antiquity Scodra was a Romanized city, which even relatively late in the Middle Ages had a native Dalmatian-speaking population which called it Skudra. Slavic Skadar is a borrowing from the Romance name.

That Albanian possesses a rich and "elaborated" pastoral vocabulary which has been taken to suggest Albanian society in ancient times was pastoral, with widespread transhumance, and stock-breeding particularly of sheep and goats.
They appear to have been cattle breeders given the vastness of preserved native vocabulary pertaining to cow breeding, milking and so forth, while words pertaining to dogs tend to be loaned. Many words concerning horses are preserved, but the word for horse itself is a Latin loan.
All the words relating to seamanship appear to be loans.

Wilkes holds that the Slavic loans in Albanian suggest that contacts between the two populations took place when Albanians dwelt in forests 600–900 metres above sea level.

However, upon close scrutiny, Skopje, Štip, and Niš may have been Albanian-speaking prior to the Slavic settlement in these areas considering that they seem to have borrowed the form of these names from Albanian. Although not necessarily the whole corresponding regions considering it's said that they are lacking in Albanian toponyms.

[cmcumm]

Surrounding European languages:
*exist*
English, Turkish and Russian:
is this for me?🥺👉👈

[fullcirclehistory]

One of my favourite map videos on Youtube. The music choice is perfect, and this language/ethnic/cultural map is probably just as important as all the political border maps we see all the time. Sad that it has so few views, it really deserves more.

[giuseppecappelluti]

Funny fact: “Russian” and “Ruthenian” meant the same thing, “of the Rus”.
But the first word comes from Greek, the second from Latin.

[NovemberTheHacker]

A few brief notes on Wallonia.
The oldest surviving text written in a langue d'oïl, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was likely written in or very near to what is now Wallonia around 880 AD.
The language border (that now splits Belgium in the middle) began to crystallize between 700 under the reign of the Merovingians and Carolingians and around 1000 after the Ottonian Renaissance.

[ARIFI.JR]

You can clearly see the ilyrian language going from being the biggest language in the balkans and then turning in to albanian in present day Kosovo and Albania.

[NovemberTheHacker]

A few brief notes. Some data suggesting Galatian surviving for a longer period of time.

In the 4th century St. Jerome (Hieronymus) wrote in a comment to Paul the Apostle's Epistle to the Galatians that "apart from the Greek language, which is spoken throughout the entire East, the Galatians have their own language, almost the same as the Treveri". The capital of the Treveri was Trier, where Jerome had settled briefly after studying in Rome.

In the 6th century AD, Cyril of Scythopolis suggested that the language was still being spoken in his own day when he related a story that a monk from Galatia was temporarily possessed by Satan and unable to speak; when he recovered from the "possession", he could respond to the questioning of others only in his native Galatian tongue.

[georgeentertainment]

This should have billions of views. We need something like this for each continent. Globalization is great for a lot of things but also has a deadly effect on languages which receive an excessive influence of the "Big Two of the Western World": English and Spanish. I speak both and I like them both very much, though. Xenophobic, nationalistic and repressive government policies also kill languages. Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7, 000 languages spoken on Earth (many of them not yet recorded) may disappear, taking with them a wealth of knowledge about history, culture, the natural environment, and the human brain.

[nrubikk]

Massive respect for grouping together bulgarian and Macedonians 🔥🔥🔥

[FaithfulOfBrigantia]

I really like the fact that you divided "Lusitanian" from Celtiberian, since indeed there were 2 different Celtic languages in the Iberian Peninsula: Northwestern Hispano-Celtic (A Celtic language without an alphabet, which i will henceforth refer to as NHC) and Celtiberian (A Celtic language that uses the Iberian alphabet).
Using Lusitanian as the name for NHC in the video is acceptable since Lusitanian was indeed a dialect derived from NHC.

I especially like the fact that you took in consideration the divide of NHC between Lusitanian and Gallaecian in the 2nd century B.C.

However, according to this video, Gallaecian is represented by the CeltIberian language, which is not correct since Gallaecian was still a NHC language not a Celtiberian one.

I appreciate that the eventual diversion between Lusitanian and Gallaecian is present in the video, but having Gallaecian belong to the Celtiberian language was a minor flaw in an otherwise perfect portrayal of pre-Roman Iberia.

[ChristopherBonis]

Everyone is gonna have at least something to quibble with, but this is still a masterful presentation of the evolution/division of European languages. It’s a tragedy that we have [almost] no idea what Old European (pre-Proto-Indo-European) tongues were like, lost forever to history.

[QWE]

really excellent video! honestly my favorite language history video for sure. The only thing I have to add is that I wish it dropped below 50 years per slide at least since 1800

[rokocikes]

Serbian and Croatian were separate languages before the 19th century, and had much lower mutual intelligibility, but in the 19th century the serbian language was replaced with the herzegovinian speech, aka croatian language by the serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić.

[Moselleball_fr]

I love the fact that Illirian became albanian when Antiquity end at 500 AD

[Mattis]

If i could go back in time i would stop the slavic and turkic migrations. As an Estonian we want the Urals back.