Ilyrian

Illyrian, also spelled Ilyrian, refers to the ancient peoples, culture, and languages associated with Illyria, a region along the western Balkan coast. The Illyrians comprised multiple tribes occupying parts of what are today Albania, Montenegro, western North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and western Serbia, from the late Bronze Age into the Roman era. They interacted with Greek city-states to the south and with Macedon to the east and were gradually absorbed into the Roman state after centuries of conflict and alliance.

Linguistically, Illyrian denotes a group of Indo-European languages that are poorly attested. The surviving inscriptions and onomastic material place Illyrian within Indo-European, but the exact relationships to other branches remain uncertain. Dalmatian, spoken along the Dalmatian coast, is the best documented of the Illyrian languages, though the overall corpus remains scant. Some scholars have proposed links between Illyrian and Albanian, or viewed Albanian as a descendant of Illyrian, but such connections are controversial and not universally accepted.

In antiquity, Illyria became part of Roman rule, first in the province of Illyricum and later reorganized into Dalmatia and Pannonia. The region played a role in Roman military and administrative life and left material traces in archaeology, art, and early Christian history. Today, the term Illyrian is used mainly in historical, linguistic, and archaeological contexts to describe the ancient peoples, their territory, and the languages they spoke, rather than a living community.