The Celtic languages belong to the Western or European section of the Indo-European family of languages along with English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and many others. In historic times, the folk who spoke a Celtic language inhabited a large part of Europe and and a lesser part of Asia minor. The area of their influence stretched from the west coast of the Iberian Peninsula in the west through the Danube Basin in the center to the Anatolia region of modern Turkey in the east. Much of what we know about the Celts is from the writings of their enemies -- the Greeks and the Romans. This wasm because theirs was an oral rather than written tradition.

The expansion and rise of the Celtic speakers was as swift as was their decline in the face of Roman conquest of the Celtic regions. In some cases the pressures of the Roman onslaught drove the Celtic speakers further north into the British Isles displacing or overlaying the influence of earlier non-Celtic inhabitants of that region. Scholars refer to the Celtic speech of the 1st century AD in what is now France as Gaulish; that of Spain as Hispana-Celtic. This seems to indicate that there is much uncertainty about the nature of the language of that time. From 500 AD onward our knowledge of Celtic languages became clearer as the areas in which they were spoken became better known at the same time the were becoming more confined.This residual area is often referred to as the 'Celtic fringe'.

Today's liguists recognize two major groups of Celtic languages each with three members. The first of these is the Goedelic group to which Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx belong; the second is the Brythonic group to which Welsh, Cornish and Beton belong. The first of these groups is sometimes called 'Q-Celtic' while the second is sometimes termed 'P-Celtic'. However, these latter labels refer to only one of many differences between the two. The Goedelic group appears to be the older of the two. Only four of the six survive today as indigenous languages with Manx and Cornish being used only in academic situations.