Gaulish

Gaulish is an extinct Celtic language that was spoken by the Gauls in ancient Gaul, a region roughly corresponding to modern France and surrounding areas. It endured from at least the early first millennium BCE until the Roman conquest and the spread of Latin, with the language gradually dying out in late antiquity.

Classification and geography: Gaulish belongs to the Continental branch of the Celtic languages, a distinct group from the Insular Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh. It is related to other continental varieties, notably Lepontic and Noric, and is known from a corpus of inscriptions and other material remains rather than continuous literary texts.

Attestation and scripts: Most Gaulish evidence comes from inscriptions carved on stone, metal, and pottery, along with a few calendrical and votive texts. The Coligny Calendar, a late pre-Roman or early Roman bronze tablet, is one of the best-known sources. Early Gaulish inscriptions used scripts influenced by Greek or Latin alphabets, and later material often appears in Latin letters, with some regional varieties linked to the Lepontic script used nearby.

Linguistic influence and legacy: Gaulish names and toponyms survive in modern geography and onomastics, and some loanwords filtered into Latin and, later, into the languages of the region. Although it ceased to be spoken, Gaulish is important for understanding the Celtic language family, its geographic spread, and the linguistic substrate of later Romance-speaking areas. Modern scholarship reconstructs aspects of its phonology and morphology from inscriptions and comparative Celtic studies.