Illyrians

The Illyrians were an Indo-European people who inhabited the western Balkans (from Epirus up into Pannonia) and parts of Southern Italy in ancient times into the Common era. They spoke languages grouped in the Illyrian languages, a separate branch of Indo-European.

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The Illyrians may have appeared in the western part of the Balkan peninsula about 1000 BC, a period coinciding with the end of the Bronze age and the beginning of the Iron age. The Illyrians were not a unified body but a group of many different tribes. These tribes however had a common culture and spoke related languages.

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Whether the Albanian language descends from an Illyrian language is disputed among scholars (see Origin of Albanians). The only attested Illyrian language is Messapian, which is not closely related to Albanian.

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Indo-European: Indo-European was originally a purely linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. By extension, it became a collective name for cultures and religions associated with these languages. Hypothetically, these cultures arose from the expansion of an ancient people, the Proto-Indo...

Balkans: : Balkan redirects here. For the Turkmen province, see: Balkan Province...

Epirus: Epirus (Greek Ήπειρος, ?peiros; see also List of traditional Greek place names), is a province or periphery in northwestern Greece, bounded by West Macedonia and Thessaly to the east, by the province of Sterea Ellada (Central Greece) to the south, the Ionian Sea an...