Celtiberian language
 
Celtiberian alphabet
The Indo-Europeans who came in the 2nd millennium BC from Rhone and Rhine to Central and Western Spain, mixed with the autochtonic population of the area and got a name of Celtiberians.  They appeared to be isolated from constant contacts with the seashore Iberian civilizations. The ethnic map of Celtiberia is very various: different tribes and nations, but all of them represented different group of Celts assimilated by Iberians or assimilating them themselves. In the Early Bronze Age their population increases mainly because of new Celtic migrations from Europe, which broadened the region of Celtic settlements in Iberia.

Celtiberians spoke a language inherited from Continental Celtic, related to Gaulish and Lepontic. But the main distinguishing feature is that Celtiberians acquired much of phonetics and lexics from non-Indo-European Iberian languages; that is reflected in placenames and names of deities. Nevertheless we can state for sure that the language belonged to Q-Celtic, so Indo-European kw- grew into q here. In fact the structure of Celtiberian grammar remained completely Celtic. The nouns are inflected, having sometimes a sibilant -s' instead of Indo-European -s. The language used about five or six cases (with accusative, dative, instrumental); the dative plural had the Italo-Celtic -b- suffix after the stem. The plural nominative either preserves Indo-European -es or develops a European -i. There is also one strange ending for genitive singular: -o which cannot be seen anywhere else in the Indo-European family.

Only two verbs are known from Celtiberian, but they witness clearly that verb endings remained Indo-European, with -t in the 3rd person singular and -nti (a primary ending) in the 3rd person plural.

Celtiberians were easily assimilated by Romans in the last centuries BC, and their language, the product of mixture of different language families, disappeared.