The dispersal of the Indo-European language family from the third millennium BCE is thought to have dramatically altered Europe’s linguistic landscape. Many of the preexisting languages are assumed to have been lost, as Indo-European languages, including Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Armenian, dominate in much of Western Eurasia from historical times. To elucidate the linguistic encounters resulting from the Indo-Europeanization process, this volume evaluates the lexical evidence for prehistoric language contact in multiple Indo-European subgroups, at the same time taking a critical stance to approaches that have been applied to this problem in the past.

Part I: Introduction

Guus Kroonen: A methodological introduction to sub-Indo-European Europe

Part II: Northeastern and Eastern Europe

Anthony Jakob: Three pre-Balto-Slavic bird names, or: A more austere take on Oštir

Ranko Matasović: Proto-Slavic forest tree names: Substratum or Proto-Indo-European origin?

Part III: Western and Central Europe

Paulus S. van Sluis: Substrate alternations in Celtic

Anders Richardt Jørgensen: A bird name suffix *-anno- in Celtic and Gallo-Romance

David Stifter: Prehistoric layers of loanwords in Old Irish

Part IV: The Mediterranean

Andrew Wigman: A European substrate velar “suffix”

Cid Swanenvleugel: Prefixes in the Sardinian substrate

Lotte Meester: Substrate stratification: An argument against the unity of Pre-Greek

Guus Kroonen: For the nth time: The Pre-Greek νϑ-suffix revisited

Part V: Anatolia & the Caucasus

Rasmus Thorsø: Alternation of diphthong and monophthong in Armenian words of substrate origin

Zsolt Simon: Indo-European substrates: The problem of the Anatolian evidence

Peter Schrijver: East Caucasian perspectives on the origin of the word ‘camel’ and some notes on European substrate lexemes