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Celtic spoken during the Roman Occupation, from which Welsh, Cornish, and Breton derive. Close similarities can also be seen with Old Irish. For example:

Gaulish was spoken throughout Celtic Europe, from what is now Belgium and France, through Switzerland and Northern Europe, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and parts of the Balkans, to the Celtic state of Galatia in central Turkey. It is obvious that the people in these areas shared a common mythological tradition.

It is difficult to be specific as to when Gaulish vanished in Europe and Asia Minor. St. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymous), during the fourth century a.d., spent some time in Ancyra (Ankara), capital of the Celtic Trocmi, and reported that the Galatians still spoke Celtic and likened it to the language of the Treveri (in Trèves, northern France). Jerome was not guessing, for he had also spent time among the Treverii. The Celtic language of Galatian probably vanished sometime between the fifth and eighth centuries a.d.

In the European areas in which the Celts settled, like northern Italy, the language seems to have vanished at a far earlier period.

In the area we now accept as “Gaul,” modern France and Belgium, it is popularly thought that Gaulish vanished with the commencement of the Roman occupation. This is, of course, not so. Gaius Sollius Apollinaris Sidonius (ca. a.d. 430–ca. 480), bishop of the Arvenri, states that the leading families of Gaul were, in his day, still trying to throw off the “scurf” of Celtic speech, as he puts it. If the leading families of Gaul in the late fifth century a.d. were trying to distance themselves from speaking Celtic, then the language must have been pretty widespread among the ordinary people. Indeed, a considerable Celtic vocabulary has actually survived in modern French. See Breton.

Gaulish Mythology

Since the Gauls left no written literature, we cannot speak of their myths or religious attitudes with complete