sylla1

Far as I'm aware, even the identity of a Pictish language (i.e. one or many) is controversial.

Chookie

It most certainly is. Yet the Venerable Bede, for all his faults, identified four languages in Britain - British, Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic and Gaulish (I think, It's some time since I read Bede).

Edgewaters

Not easily, but obviously it does happen. Where is the pre-Celtic tongue of Britain? It can still be seen here and there in place-names, but it seems to have vanished entirely as a spoken language otherwise. Nonetheless, descendants of the speakers still thrive in Britain (witness Cheddar Man, for instance).

Several languages and a galaxy of dialects have died in France.

We don't exactly know when Celtic dialects ceased to exist in France. They were being written up until the 6th century, but absence of written documents doesn't mean they weren't being spoken in remote rural areas, so the date of their disappearance might be considerably later. All we know for sure is that they haven't survived to the present day.

galteeman

Its even unknown what Cheddar man was speaking. According to this article it is possible that Indo European started to spread in the Mesolithic instead of the conventional view of much later.

Quote:

The possibility that the initial dispersal event of the Indo-European languages involved not Neolithic farm- ers or Bronze Age warriors but Mesolithic hunter- gatherers has been mentioned briefly by several writers (e.g., Renfrew 1987), but no one seems to have given the idea more than a passing thought

The mainstream view of the divergence of Indo European languages such as Celtic, Germanic, Italic etc. is 6000-7000 years ago but these guys suggest that the traditional linguistic dating may be wrong and that the divergence could be a far older event. It is possible that Indo European came into northern Europe far earlier than the Kurgans or the Neolithic farmer theories suggest. Perhaps Cheddar man was already speaking an early form of what we now call Celtic.

beorna

Y-DNA for France : 70% R1b, 13% E1b1b, 12% R1a, 5% I
England: 70% R1b, 22% R1a, 8% I
Germany: 45% R1b, 25% I, R1a 15%, J 10%, E1b1b 5%
Netherlands: 77% R1b, 14% R1a, 9% I
Belgium: 72% R1b, 18% R1a, 5% I, 5% E1b1b
Spain:76% R1b, 15% E1b1b, 9% R1a

you see that R1b is common in the West. Germany has a minor degrade but through Germany runs the border between strong R1a and R1b. Both R1a and R1b reach back in time untill at least the last maximum of the last glacial. Europe was divided by an arctic desert into two regions. When the iceshield melted away both populations had time to mix again.
Haplogroup E is old two. This group came perhaps to these regions with a neolithic migration from the Near East and Northern Africa. But of course medieval migrations (Arabs in Spain) can be responsible for some results.
It is the same with I, there is a refugium on the Balkans, perhaps even from glacial times.
so we have four haplogroups, all mixed since perhaps at least 10 to 5 thousand years. How can we say what is Celtic and what not? The oldest Celts we have in eastern France and western Germany. So there will be all four haplogroups within the old Celts.
so at least it is impossible to identify Celts by DNA

Liguistically we can say that the Northeast of Gaul was Frankish. The old boarderline between Roman and frankish was more western than today but the greatest parts of Gaul were Romanic speaking.

There were Franks in Gaul and Goth and Burgundians, in the far East Alamannians and splitters of other groups, but they were just a few ten thousands within a mass of millions.

The identification with the past in France has changed throughout the times. During the monarchy Franch especially looked on their Frankish roots. The French revolution were a change and the later conflicts with germany let a Celtic or Roman preference become stronger.

So the conclusion for me is: French are first French, with a rich history and roots in different populations and cultures.

barlier

Many* are European or from their city and yes others are French**.

* Characteristics : Live(d) abroad, have travelled in Europe, work(ed) in multinational companies, have Europeans in their famillies, or understand that France has a leading nation, all by itself, is over. A few speak in english to their children.

** nickname : Gaulois or Franco-français.

Celticguy

The french are gallic. End of story

barlier

You mean garlic.

stormbringerr

they were once called Gauls and Gaulish was an dialect of the early Celts.
i myself am of Celtic heritage since my family are descendants of the welsh.

Ayazid

Well, from linguistic point of view most French are certainly not "Celts", except a tiny minority in Brittany, which is bilingual in Breton (Celtic) and French (Romance). There is a small number of Gaulish loanwords in French, but it's quite limited. On the other hand, local names of Celtic origin are quite abundant in France (for example Auvergne, Paris, Lyon, Isère, Seine and many others).

From cultural point of view, I am actually not sure what is the word "Celtic" supposed to mean. There might be some elements in the French folklore which might be traced to Celtic origins (I am excluding Brittany here, that's another story), but I am not sure how numerous they are and if they are strong enough to qualify the whole French traditional culture as "Celtic". However, I have doubts about that.

As for the importance of Celtic element for the self-identification of French people, I guess that many certainly feel some vague connection to Gauls and this chapter of French history, after all the notion of Gauls as ancestors of the French people, expressed in the famous words “Nos ancêtres, les Gaulois", certainly has had some influence on French national consciousness, but I don't think that many of them consider themselves to be "purely" Celtic in any sense of the word.

As for the Celtic element in the ancestry of French people I will continue commenting the following post of barlier.

I would dare to say that this view is a bit too radical. If we exclude recent immigrants (mostly from Northern & Sub-Saharan Africa), who are certainly French citizens (nobody is denying this fact), albeit not "ethnically French", most French people probably have some Gaulish ancestors. Of course, this is merely an educated guess, as nobody can trace his ancestry to times 2000 years ago, but I think that Gauls formed a genetic base which has never been replaced by subsequent immigration waves (Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Vikings, recent immigrants from elsewhere.). However, these newcomers enriched significantly the French gene pool.

Other thing is that Gauls themselves were in no way a "pure race", since after their arrival to the territory of modern France they certainly mixed with indigenous pre-Celtic populations and some parts of France were not even fully celticized (Aquitania, southwestern coast around Marseille).

Sincerely, I think that today "Celt" is a meaningless category if it doesn't mean "Celtic speaker" (and to find one in Paris would be certainly quite difficult!). We are not living in antiquity anymore and after some 2000 years of various cultural and religious transformations and mixing it's impossible to speak about "Celtic", "Germanic", "Roman" or "Slavic" cultures or "pure Celts", "Slavs" etc. Irish people are commonly considered to be a Celtic nation, but all of them speak English as their native tongue (just a small minority is fully bilingual), are mostly Catholics (at least nominally) and have basically the same way of live as any Western European nation. Personally, I consider them just to be an anglophone people with Celtic cultural heritage than "Celtic people".