The Iberian language was the language of a people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian Peninsula. The ancient Iberians can be identified as a rather nebulous local culture between the 7th and 1st century BC. The Iberian language, like all the other Paleohispanic languages except Basque, became extinct by the 1st to 2nd centuries AD, after being gradually replaced by Latin. Iberian is speculated to be a language isolate, but while its different scripts have been deciphered to various extents, the language itself remains largely unknown.
Links with other languages have been claimed, especially the Basque language, but they have not been clearly demonstrated to the satisfaction of modern scholarship.
Read more about Iberian Language: Geographic Distribution, History, Writing
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)