9.3 Roman conquest
The Roman conquest was thus a major event for the part of northwestern Europe that was subjected to it. We can still see its impact in the language map of the region today. This map is made up of features of varying antiquity. By far the oldest is likely to be the existence of Basque, now confined to a small territory in southwestern France and northern Spain, but once considerably more widespread. It is the only surviving non-Indo- European language of western Europe; it may even have been more or less where it now is since Upper Palaeolithic times.
The next-oldest stratum is the Celtic languages, a branch of Indo- European of much later vintage. With the Celtic presence we come to the first period in the past of northern Europe for which we can begin to match archaeological evidence with the record of historical sources- though as yet these sources derive only from the Mediterranean world and are very patchy. In this way we know that in the centuries around the middle of the first millennium B.C., the Celts came to occupy a vast area of northern Europe and also intruded into each of the four Mediterranean peninsulas- violently in the three cases where we have direct historical testimony, and presumably also in Spain. Hence Celtic languages were well established in Gaul and the British Isles at the time of the Roman conquest. Yet in France, just as in Italy and Spain, and very likely in southeastern Britain, the effect of the conquest was to spread Latin at the expense of the local languages. Initially this must have affected mainly the urban elite, but eventually Latin displaced Celtic even among the peasantry. Today all that is left of the once massive dominance of Celtic in northwestern Europe is the "Celtic fringe" of Brittany and the British Isles-the rest of the region speaks languages derived from Latin or Germanic.
So it is clear that Roman conquest broke the cultural continuity of Celtic Europe; only in peripheral regions beyond the imperial frontiers- above all, in Ireland did an integral Celtic culture survive.