Aquan languages

This article is about a hypothetical ancient natlang family. For the languages of water elementals in fantasy settings, see Elemental languages.

Aquan is a term coined by Jörg Rhiemeier for the hypothetical language of the Old European Hydronymy. He conjectures that this language may have been an Indo-European language related to the Anatolian branch of that family, spoken by the Bell Beaker culture, on the grounds that both probably originated in the southwestern outlier of the Yamnaya culture on the Lower Danube. It may have been a kentum language with an *o > *a merger, thus not the ancestor of the Celtic languages in whose history the latter change did not happen (nor in the Italic languages).

Aquan languages would have been spoken in most parts of Western Europe during much of the Bronze Age, before they were eclipsed by Italic, Celtic and Germanic languages either in the late Bronze Age (Urnfield culture) or in the early Iron Age (Hallstatt culture).

He admits, though, that this hypothesis is highly speculative and so far insufficiently confirmed by linguistic data. It is not even certain that the Old European Hydronymy is the reflex of a distinct stratum of lost languages and not merely a meaningless pattern falling out of the sheer amount of data points comparable to ley lines, and that the Bell Beaker culture corresponds to a linguistic entity.

Jörg Rhiemeier's Hesperic conlang family is a re-creation (not a scholarly reconstruction) of this hypothetical branch of the Indo-European family.