Sub-Indo-European Europe

Book excerpt: The dispersal of the Indo-European language family from the third millennium BCE is thought to have dramatically altered Europe's linguistic landscape. Many of the preexisting languages are assumed to have been lost, as Indo-European languages, including Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Armenian, dominate in much of Western Eurasia from historical times. To elucidate the linguistic encounters resulting from the Indo-Europeanization process, this volume evaluates the lexical evidence for prehistoric language contact in multiple Indo-European subgroups, at the same time taking a critical stance to approaches that have been applied to this problem in the past.