A scholarly video on YouTube concerning the languages of pre-Celtic Britain and Ireland. Or rather speculations about what they could have been.
One rather obvious idea is that the pre-Celtic populations of the British Isles spoke non-Indo-European languages, the Celts being the first Indo-European people(s) to reach the area. Pictish may have been a late survival of these non-IE tongues. Another speculation is that there was an earlier Indo-European migration to the isles. This branch of the IE language family would be long extinct.
Perhaps more attested is the notion of a vast Sprachbund regrouping Celtic, Berber and Vasconic languages, perhaps also West African ditto. Linguists have long noted peculiar grammatical similarities between the Celtic and Berber languages, yet they don´t seem closely related and are placed in entirely different language families.
It also struck me when watching this video that all of this is really "luxury knowledge" of interest only to a very narrow group of specialists or nerds. Throughout most of human (pre)history, people simply spoke whatever language they happened to have and got on with their lives (or migrations) rather than analyzing its syntactic structures...
We are WEIRD. And not a little insular!
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