Celtic

The Celtic languages form a branch of the Indo-European family, descended from the reconstructed Proto-Celtic. Around the first millennium BC they were spoken across western and central Europe and as far as central Anatolia; the earliest surviving Celtic text is a Lepontic inscription from the Alps dated to around 600 BC.

These continental tongues had died out by the early Middle Ages, leaving the Insular Celtic languages of the Atlantic fringe. They split into the Goidelic, or Gaelic, branch and the Brittonic branch, whose Breton was carried to Armorica by migrants from Britain.

Irish was long carved in the Ogham alphabet before Latin letters spread to all of them, and both branches sustained medieval literatures of annals, saints' lives and bardic verse.