How about the Wales language which is called Celtic?
The language of Wales is called
Welsh, and it is indeed a member of the Celtic subgroup of Western Indo-European. The other primary members are Irish (which is also called Gaelic) and Breton, the language of the people of Brittany, a small province in France. There are a few other Celtic languages with a small number of speakers who are struggling to keep them alive, such as Cornish (the language of Cornwall in the southwest of England) and Manx (the language of the Isle of Man). In addition, some Scots also speak a dialect of Gaelic, although since the formation of the United Kingdom virtually all of them speak English as their primary language.
The Celts were the first Indo-European tribe to settle in Europe. Because they arrived with the advanced agricultural and early Bronze Age technologies they had learned from being on the fringe of Mesopotamian civilization in the Pontic Steppe (including wheels, domesticated horses, and simple metal tools and weapons), they quickly took leadership over the earlier population of
Homo sapiens who already lived there. They pretty much had the place to themselves for several centuries and a large number of Celtic languages evolved.
Then the Hellenic tribes followed them over, the Germanic tribes took the long route through Scandinavia and down from the north, and the Romans arose--a people whose origin is not clear; some scholars think they might have simply been a band of Celts who split off from their comrades very early. The Greeks and Romans had steady contact with the Phoenicians and other traders from the advanced Mesopotamian civilizations, so Greco-Roman civilization evolved rapidly. The Romans quickly took control over all of central and western continental Europe. The Celts were absorbed and their languages are lost except for a small number of place names.
The Celts remained in control of the British Isles. The language spoken at that time on Britannia is known as Brythonic, and the one on Ireland is Goidelic. But when the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century and the Romans abandoned Brittania, Germanic tribes (primarily the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, but also many others) sailed over and occupied the place. The native Celtic population was marginalized and the country soon became known as Angle Land, a named which evolved phonetically into England, just as their Germanic language, Anglisc, is now called English.
There were only a few places in southern Brittania where the original Celtic communities survived. Wales and Cornwall are the major regions. The northern half of Brittania had never been conquered and was the home of the Picts, a tribe we know very little about. They may have been another Indo-European tribe, or they may have been one of the older groups of humans, like the modern Basques. Eventually the Irish began exploring the region and ultimately colonized it, so today their descendants, the Scots, still keep their Gaelic language.
During the Anglo-Saxon conquest, some of the Celtic people decided to escape. They sailed to the northwestern coast of France and founded the colony of Brittany--a name which echoes the original name "Brythonic." Today they are reasonably well integrated into French culture and live in harmony with the French people, but they keep their Celtic language alive.
Such are the ways of history. Celtic languages were once spoken all over Europe. Today they survive only on a few islands and in a tiny corner of France. And in all of their surviving homelands there is tremendous pressure to replace them: with English in Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland, and with French in Brittany.
