Nearly all European languages belong to a single linguistic group: Indo-European. The exceptions are Finnish, Saami and Estonian as well as (more distantly), Hungarian (Finno-Altaic-Ugrian), Turkish (Altaic),* Maltese (Semitic, albeit with considerable Italian, Spanish and English borrowing) and Basque (no known language group). With the exception of Basque, all these non-Indo-European languages are incomers. But so too are the Indo-European languages themselves. This has so completely eradicated all traces of pre-Indo-European languages in Europe with a near-linguicidal thoroughness apart from the occasional geographical name that glimmers through that Indo-European has become ‘us’ as Europeans. This, of course, took an extreme form with the Nazis, but even rationally the search for Indo-European roots – linguistic and geographical – has occupied more academic energies than similar questions of the common origin of other language groups.

That the spread of a language goes hand in hand with the spread of a people – indeed, the one is the result of the other – is so well attested by history that it hardly needs reiterating: the spread of Spanish into Central and South America by the conquistadores and settlers is an obvious example.