00:00 In the bustling market of the Mediterranean around 500 BC, a diverse array of languages were spoken by traders, merchants, and enslaved individuals, reflecting the interconnectedness of the Eurasian world at the time.

04:31 By 500 BC, the Celtic languages had arrived in Britain and Ireland through a recent wave of migration, as confirmed by genetic studies, indicating a substantial turnover in the ancient DNA record during the Late Bronze Age.

08:34 By 500 BC, the Celtic languages had spread among widely separated groups of Celtic speakers who were already in place and had been for some time, displacing non-Celtic languages across Western and Central Europe, while in southern France and Iberia, the expanding Celtic languages encountered the ancestral forms of the Basque language, which was part of a thriving family of related tongues.

12:41 By 500 BC, the linguistic situation in Northern Europe and Scandinavia remains unclear, but it is believed that proto-Germanic was spoken in a small area of Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia, while Baltic languages, Finnic languages, and the ancestral form of Slavic were also likely spoken in the region.

17:16 By 500 BC, the Venetic language had spread throughout the Mediterranean, with colonies and enclaves of native Venetic speakers in various regions, including the Levant, Sicily, Iberia, and North Africa, where it coexisted with other languages such as Numidian and Berber.

21:38 By 500 BC, there were many different Italic languages spoken in Italy, including Oskun, Umbrian, South Pacini, and Venetic, alongside Latin and Etruscan, while Greek was firmly established in the central Mediterranean region, with various dialects spoken throughout.

25:41 By 500 BC, the Greek dialects had merged and become more homogenous, Anatolian languages were losing ground to Greek, and Aramaic had become the lingua franca in Mesopotamia.

29:58 In the region north of Greece, the Thracians spoke their own branch of Indo-European, but it's unclear how it related to other languages in the area, such as Dacian, Illyrian, and Albanian, while the Scythians, who inhabited the steppe, spoke an eastern Iranian language called Scythian, but other languages were likely spoken by non-elite individuals in the region.

34:08 In the forest steppe and the steppe region, there were likely divergent varieties of Indo-Iranian spoken, including Skithian, as well as other languages such as northwest and northeast Caucasian languages, Uralic languages, and Iranian languages.

38:12 In 500 BC, the Tokarian languages were a separate branch of Indo-European that had already diverged from Proto-Indo-European, while to the north of the Altai Mountains in Siberia, there were speakers of unrelated language families such as the Aeneasian languages, and as we move east towards Mongolia and Manchuria, there were the ancestors of the Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages that had close contact and cultural overlap with each other, likely due to intensive interactions and bilingualism, and in the extreme eastern end of Asia, there was language contact between the ancestors of the Koreanic and Japanic languages and the speakers of Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolic, and in China, Old Chinese was the written form of the language, but there were likely other languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family that were not recorded.

42:27 In 500 BC, southern China had a massive diversity of languages, including the ancestors of the Kradai languages, the Austroasiatic tongues, and possibly Austronesian languages, making China a linguistically diverse place even more so than today.